The Past is a Grotesque Animal

​It never was what it was.

Note: this was originally posted to my Substack on May 9, 2023. I deleted that Substack a couple years ago and I’m posting these pieces here so they don’t get lost. This post is a sequel of sorts to two previous posts, Raise Hight the Roots (from Dec. 2021) and Gallery of the Body (from Aug. 2022).

Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach, Mount Athos as a Colossal Statue (1721). Vitruvius describes how the Macedonian sculptor Dinocrates proposed to Alexander that he would “form Mount Athos into the statue of a man [Alexander] holding a spacious city in his left hand, and in his right a huge cup, into which shall be collected all the streams of the mountain, which shall then be poured into the sea."

I need a steam shovel mama to

Keep away the dead

I need a dump truck mama to

Unload my head

—Bob Dylan, “From a Buick 6”

Collectors and Collectees

At the archives where I work, we’ve always called the people whose papers we collect “collectees.” I used that made-up term for many years and thought nothing of it until I used it in front of an actual “collectee” and she let out an acrid chuckle. “Is that what we are?” She said this while we strolled past an aisle of glass cases exhibiting various archival documents, including items from her collection. “I suppose it does make you sound like specimens,” I said, tilting my tone slightly towards apology. Nevertheless there they were, the rare specimens, objects plucked from personal remains for being historic; if not, then representative of a career; if not, then visually stimulating or at least strange and fascinating; pinned to the boards and exposed under glass, the exotic beetles of a person’s life. The grotesquerie of the display wasn’t my intention nor my fault — our “personal papers” archives are, by their nature, snugly sleeved inside a casing of aging and death. Impossible to peruse them for long without hearing the awful sound of mortal dread stirring behind its padlocked psychic door. My culpability here is limited, so needs be my apology.

Cryptoporticus of the Domus Aurea, Rome (c. 64-8). Photo courtesy Sebastià Giralt, 2017, CC-SA 2.0.

Ruins of the Golden House

The word grotesque was created to describe a particular, wonderful encounter with the past, specifically by early modern Europeans living among the remains of the ancient Roman Empire. The story goes that one fine day around 1480 a young man strolling on the Esquiline Hill in Rome slipped through a fissure in the earth. He found himself in a mysterious underground grotto — though that word wouldn’t exist in Italian until the 1610s; the Romans would have called it a crypta (taken, of course, from the Greeks, who used the word krypte to mean “hidden place”); our young man might have called it a cropta. This cropta was like nothing else in 1480s Rome: an enormous gallery filled with carved, painted figures, its cavernous walls varnished with endless vibrant frescoes. The young man had accidentally re-discovered the legendary Domus Aurea (“Golden House”) of Emperor Nero.

In July 64 CE, a fire started somewhere among the merchant stalls hawking their wares near the Circus Maximus in Rome. After nine burning days the Great Fire of Rome had destroyed two-thirds of the city. Nero, in the midst of organizing relief, saw an opportunity in the suddenly-cleared land. While the burned-over areas were being rebuilt and improved from their old designs, Nero commissioned work on a massive personal palace-complex. It included its own aqueduct, feeding a monumental nymphaeum fountain-temple whose waters drained into an artificial lake, which was in turn surrounded by a kind of artificial countryside of villas, vineyards, and forests; an entire banquet hall that rotated in sync with the heavens (this might have been a legend until the hall and its mechanism were unearthed in 2009); the Colossus Neronis, an almost-100-foot-tall bronze statue of the Emperor himself; a sunken garden, various pavilions, an art gallery, over 300 rooms (but no bedrooms as it was an event space, not lodgings), endless hallways covered with frescoes, gems, and gold leaf. According to Suetonius (who really can’t be trusted, but is so entertaining he gets quoted anyway) “when the edifice was finished … and he dedicated it, he deigned to say nothing more in the way of approval than that he had at last begun to live like a human being.” Nevertheless, it was only four years into its construction when Nero killed himself in 68 CE at the age of 30.

The Domus Aurea was perhaps the most obvious, enduring public symbol of Nero’s legacy of wanton excess. The jewels, ivory, gold, and other valuable materials were methodically stripped out. Large portions were simply filled with dirt and paved over. I Vespasian built a great amphitheater over the artificial lake (after the Colossus Neronis was moved there it became known as the '“Colosseum”), Domitian commissioned a giant complex of baths (later the Baths of Trajan) built over the Esquiline Wing, Hadrian had the titanic Temple of Venus and Roma erected on top of much of what was left. Within forty years of Nero’s death the Domus Aurea was either destroyed or invisible. By 1480 it was all ruins sealed beneath other ruins.

Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino, called Raphael, (1483–1520, Italy) and Giovanni da Udine (1487–1564, Italy). Loggetta of Cardinal Bibbiena, Palazzi Pontifici, Vatican (c. 1516). Fresco. Photo courtesy Scala, Florence/Art Resource, NY.

House of Golden Ruins

The new humanists of Renaissance Rome thrilled to the accidental rediscovery of Nero’s Domus Aurea. The only way to describe this uncanny combination of classical beauty debauched by ludicrous excess and abyssal time was “grotto-esque” — i.e. like the art discovered in the hidden grottoes — in Italian, grottesco, later in French grotesque.

Tyler Rockey writes about the encounter between the Romans of 68 and 1480 in his 2021 piece Between Spaces: The Domus Aurea, the Vatican Loggetta, and Foucault’s Heterotopia:

An anonymous fifteenth-century artist who visited this place poetically described this experience of difference and the oddities of being there: “[I]n every season the rooms are full of painters. Here summer seems cooler than winter . . . we crawl along the ground on our stomachs, armed with bread, ham, fruits and wine, looking more bizarre than the grotesques” (Michael Squire, “Fantasies so Varied and Bizarre: The Domus Aurea, The Renaissance, and the ‘Grotesque,’” in A Companion to the Neronian Age, ed. Martin T. Dinter and Emma Buckley (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 448).

This type of decoration was the antithesis of what the Renaissance had understood as classical and sought to implement through its antique vocabulary. Grotesque decoration, derived from ancient Roman precedents, was employed in fresco or sculpted on walls, ceilings, and architectural frames. It was characterized by hybrids of plant, animal, and human forms; metamorphic and sprawling ornamental candelabra motifs; and illogical and irrational compositions. … In essence, for the Renaissance viewers, the grotesque presented an inversion of the classical aesthetic ideals of naturalism, harmony, proportion, and rationality of form. And yet this antithesis emerged from the Roman earth and directly out of the classical past, greatly shifting attitudes around this decorative mode through the significance of the discovery of the ruin.

Rockey uses the example of the cryptoporticus of the Domus Aurea (the first photo above) and the way it was reproduced by Raphael within the Vatican itself (second photo) to show how the grotesque came to inhabit the Renaissance imagination:

Sixteenth-century artists went beyond the humanist literary imagination, which had conjured a vision of both present and past engendered by the study of ancient materials, and worked instead directly into the physical urban fabric in order to resurrect the body of ancient Rome.

This is what we see in the Loggetta of Cardinal Bibbiena, a space constructed by Raphael and decorated by the grotesque specialist of his workshop, Giovanni da Udine. Raphael and Giovanni had descended into the heterotopic Domus Aurea sometime around 1510, reemerging with the imagined and idealized mental forms of the spaces they encountered, and transformed these concepts into tangible forms in the current time and space of the Vatican. The shape of the Loggetta clearly recalls that of the cryptoporticus and the ethos of the former’s decorations are inspired by the latter’s ceilings and walls in a manner that most closely imitated the original space to date.

…This reimagining of the cryptoporticus and the resurrection of its decorative mode and means of execution in effect suspend the heterotopic, temporal difference at play between the Loggetta and the Domus Aurea. They reintroduce some proximal bundles of relations that tie this space to the larger fabric of the Renaissance. This is what lies in between these spaces: an awareness of the past, the desire for re-completion, and the utility of art in mediating temporalities.

Leon Battista Alberti, from Della Pictura (1435)

In 1435, almost four decades prior to the rediscovery of Nero’s Golden House, Leon Battista Alberti’s treatise Della Pictura used mathematics to show how the human eye creates the illusions of linear perspective, including the horizon and the vanishing point (above). After 1480 the visual representation of perspective — the illusion of depth in space, on a two-dimensional surface — was matched by a conception of visualized “history” as the illusion of depth in time — specifically their location in the foreground of that pseudo-spatial depth. If this foreground is understood as the present, then we also accept that it’s in constant motion, sliding from the clarity of the foreground to the obscurity of the background, losing detail as the clock ticks, finally absorbed into the abyssal singularity of the vanishing point. On the base level of physics this is time’s arrow, Newton’s Second Law.

But culture doesn’t obey the laws of physics.

The Grotesque Animal of the Past

St Philip Driving the Dragon from the Temple of Hieropolis, fresco in Strozzi Chapel by Filippino Lippi, Santa Maria Novella Principal Dominican church in Florence, Italy. Created ca. 1490 CE.

Wider view of the above work, for scale.

Filippino Lippi was one of the artists whose style was transformed by spelunking in the Domus Aurea. The world that exists within his art is suddenly sharper and brighter. Everything feels heightened and amplified; a dialectic rages between a realism of detail and an artifice of impossible colors, poses, and subjects, synthesized by the beholder into Dali-esque surrealism.

One of the first major pieces created by Lippi after his journey into the grotesque past was the fresco above. In the fresco, Philip the Apostle is in the Greco-Phrygian city of Hieropalis (where he will later be martyred, crucified upside down). He is approaching a creature on the ground, which everyone else in the images is cowering away from in terror or literal disgust — the story goes that the breath of the creature was sickening the inhabitants of the city. The image captures the moment when Philip approaches without fear, intent on casting out this malevolent force with the righteous power of Christ, literally cleansing the city and bringing it salvation in the process.

But take a look at the creature in question. What is it? It’s described as a dragon, yet it’s so strange, so stylistically jarring, so obviously grotesque in the modern sense, that “evil monster” doesn’t do it justice. Even if we take it at surface value, why is there there? Was it summoned? How did it find a home there? There are oddities that might be clues, like the piece of broken stone at the foot of the altar, which might be the kind of esoteric symbols Renaissance artists utilized to ultra-densify their work. But I think there are larger, tidal forces represented by this encounter.

The image is totally dominated by the pagan altar, in the center of which is a gold-on-blue pedestal decorated in a style straight out of the Domus Aurea. Lippi’s representation of the literal grotesque is at the visual core of this work, because in this context it represents the past — specifically the shock wave resulting from the impact between the past and the present. The counterpart to Philip in this image isn’t the “dragon” on the floor, it’s the pagan statue on the altar, its arm raised in an invocation of holy power, a gesture echoed by Philip. The statue’s arm holds a broken sword and is surrounded by armor and the trappings of war and violence; Philip, dressed plainly compared to the others, holds no weapons and approaches with humility, his face obscured by his outstretched arm. The dragon faces away from him, perhaps unable to face his purity. The loose stone near the dragon almost suggests that the dragon was birthed from the altar itself, suggesting that the believers in the pagan past have inherited only decay and pestilence masked by splendor. The splendor, however, is still there, and in the context of the artwork it’s impossible to ignore. Perhaps Lippi has mixed feelings about repudiating the pagan past? Perhaps he can reconcile the old and new, synthesize them even, in a newly-discovered-yet-still classical aesthetic — the grotesque.

A grotesque animal.

Lippi’s fresco is an nexus of confrontations: pagan and Christian, Classic and Renaissance humanist, Lippi’s own past as an artist and his new style, all of the above and the eternally present moment of beholding by us. The historical, conceptual foreground is crowded with overlapping vertices, a vertiginous collision of perspectives, out of which chaos is born the creature that crouches and snarls at eye-height to the viewer; the animal that both is grotesque and represents the grotesque, the monster birthed from this churn of past and present, clawing its way towards us from the forbidden zone of time’s vanishing point.

The Past is a Grotesque Animal

In 2007 the band Of Montreal released their album Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? Dead center on the track listing is the hypnotic, minimalist twelve-minute long song “The Past is a Grotesque Animal.” Over the course of the song Kevin Barnes supposedly transforms into a Ziggy Stardust-like alter ego named Georgie Fruit, who performs the rest of the album (and the next two Of Montreal albums). Why would he do this? According to Rolling Stone:

DURING THE RECORDING of Of Montreal’s eighth album, Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer?, Kevin Barnes was going through a difficult time. "On a creative level, my life was going great," the songwriter told Rolling Stone, "but on a personal level, it was totally falling apart." Epic 12-minute track "The Past is a Grotesque Animal" is the centerpiece and turning point of the album, on which Barnes embodies his alter ego, Georgie Fruit. "I'm not suffering from split personality or anything," he said, of the multiple personae on the record. "This just gives me an opportunity to write from a different perspective [emphasis added]."

The song starts with Barnes singing:

The past is a grotesque animal
And in its eyes you see
How completely wrong you can be

The rest of the song is a series of memories, present thoughts, impulses, second-guesses, regrets, reflections. A chord sequence repeats as a pattern in the constant musical present while, for the singer, the past and present overlap each other. But we now know: wading through the smashed-together wreckage of “before” and “now” is our very experience of the true present. All moments are intersections in time and space, all histories are imaginary histories, all imagination a merging of images and magic.

Kevin Barnes’s semi-singing style in this song is close to something called sprechstimme, literally “speak-singing,” which is close to what you’d hear in a musical, and also an art song, the kind favored by the late, great soprano Phyllis Curtin.

The Soprano’s Handwriting

Phyllis Curtin performing as Salome in 1954.

It used to be part of my job to drive out to collectees’ homes in a rented cargo van or mini-van, usually with a partner. We would go into their garage, basement, or attic, gather up whatever it was they wanted us to have, and drive off with it back to the archives. Many collectees were cordial and welcoming and often would insist on feeding us. We were packing up their life’s work and carting it away; they were stirred them into a range of emotions: nostalgia, relief, mourning, curiosity about the the workings of the archive. Others, usually the children or grandchildren of the original collectees, made it clear we were there to clear some storage space and should get off their property as soon as possible.

In March 2004 I had to drive out to Great Barrington, Massachusetts to the home of Phyllis Curtin. Mrs. Curtin was a legendary soprano, a beloved teacher, and one of those people about whom no one can think of anything bad to say, an amazing feat in the backbiting worlds of opera and classical music. My co-driver got sick at the last minute so it was just me and a van and my printed-out MapQuest pages to take me from my apartment in Quincy, Massachusetts six hours across the entire state and six hours back again. My daughter was not quite a year old and had already decided that she despised anything that impeded her constant movement, including and especially sleep. So I was bleary when I set out around 4:00 am for the Berkshires. I exited the Mass Pike and wound my way to a plain black mailbox where I turned onto a dark brown dirt road. I found myself driving through farmland, then a short corridor of trees new with spring green, then finally a large, brown house where the road ended.

The house looked like various smaller dwellings slotted together. Behind the main house were some outbuildings that looked like small barns. In one of those barns Mrs. Curtin had stored the papers of her husband, Eugene Cook. He had been a longtime photographer for Time-Life and was, of course, a collectee. When I eventually got back to the office, a co-worker described how he had been sent out to that same property back in the 1980s to acquire the Eugene Cook collection, and how he had to wrangle hundreds and hundreds of prints, negatives, and slides out of a hayloft. He may have exaggerated a bit but it does explain the scent of straw that still clings to the photo prints.

Inside the house I was greeted warmly by Mrs. Curtin and her large dogs. She led me around the corner into an open area where a black metal music stand was stationed next to a slightly dusty grand piano. Next to this tiny rehearsal space was an alcove of shelves and cabinets; these held the scores and sheet music I had come for.

We went through the loose sheet music together — the bound scripts, she said, were pieces she wasn’t ready to part with. I was looking for pieces that had her own notes on them, as that made them unique, and thus good specimens; she was looking to weed out pieces that she never sang, as she felt they didn’t belong in her papers. She would sometimes point out individual pieces when they sparked a memory, reeling off stories about Leonard Bernstein, Virgil Thompson, and Ned Rorem, all of whom had composed songs for her to sing. She would hold a piece in front of her, sometimes softly sound a note or two, smile, and hand me the score — or it would spark nothing and she would slide it onto to the reject pile.

I was specifically chosen to be there because the people at work knew I had a “background in music,” which to them meant I could read music and recognized composers’ names. Some of them knew that I had spent a year at New England Conservatory right out of high school, where I majored in bassoon performance. What no one knew, because I didn’t tell them, was that my year trying to be a professional musician almost killed me. I wasn’t cut out for a life of nothing but constant practice, rehearsal, and competition. The stress of it, combined with my gnawing fear at finding myself utterly adrift, truly messed me up. At some point I stopped eating much, then bathing, then sleeping. Instead of practicing I would wander the streets of Boston, usually ending up in a bookstore or library until closing time (having lost track of time). I was lucky enough to still be seeing my girlfriend from high school, who was also going to college in Massachusetts and was a train ride away (we married a few years later) so we were able to support each other during that year — she had gone to a Christian college and was coming to realize that the school’s religiosity was not for her. I was also lucky enough to transfer to a different school after that year, where they assumed I would want to join the orchestra. But I never wanted to play music on a stage again, so I never have, and I probably never will.

While I was going through the scores with Mrs. Curtin I noticed some handwriting that looked different from hers on a few pieces, so I asked her who that other person was who had written on these scores. She looked confused, so I handed her an example. She laughed when she saw it. “When I was a girl growing up in West Virginia,” she said, “I wrote with my left hand. But back then you weren’t supposed to be left-handed. The teachers would hit my hand with a ruler if they caught me writing with my left. So I started writing with my right hand in front of the teachers. They thought I switched” — she chuckled — “but really I just trained myself to write equally well with both hands. When they weren’t watching I would still use my left hand. Those notations are both me, sometimes I used to switch back and forth between hands — that’s what you’re seeing.”

We were together in that windowed room, and she was in Clarksburg, West Virginia, and I was staring blankly at the wall of a basement practice room on Huntington Avenue; perhaps she was on a stage somewhere singing a song Ned Rorem wrote for her to sing, perhaps I was in Jordan Hall huffing as hard as I could into a contrabassoon playing along with Mahler’s 4th Symphony, both of us hearing music of the past, vectors of time cross-crossing next to that dusty piano and those pine cabinets. This is our experience of temporality. Not how we live it as packets of matter in the backwash of entropy, jellyfish carried on the cosmic tide of the expanding universe, but how we inhabit it as living beings with minds and memories: tracks and trajectories of our pasts, real and possible, true and imagined, psychological and historical, constantly searchlight-sweeping from background to foreground and back again. Where the lines merge they briefly constellate into shapes, creatures perhaps, animals beautiful, and ugly, in other words: grotesque.

When I had collected all the specimens I could I made to go, eager to get on the road for my six-hour return drive. But Mrs. Curtin insisted that I stay for lunch, which, after a brief and frantic scan of her pantry, ended up being Cambpell’s tomato soup for two. As we ate I told her that someone from the archive would come for the rest of her papers whenever she was ready. She leaned forward and pointed her spoon at me. “I think it should be you,” she said.

“It never was what it was”

The 1976 television series I, Claudius has an early scene set at the birthday party for the Roman Emperor Augustus in 24 BCE. One of the entertainments the Emperor has lined up is a poetic recounting the Battle of Actium by a renowned Greek orator. The quiet the hall, an unnamed usher steps up and slams his staff on the floor three times, shouting “Caesar calls for silence!”

The Greek orator is stunned. “What a voice!” he says. “Perhaps we should change places! Only the Romans can afford ushers with a voice like that. Did you have any training?”

“I was an actor, sir,” the usher replies.

“Oh, that explains it. Resting, are you?”

“No sir, I’ve given it up. Everyone’s an actor in Rome. There just isn’t enough work to go ‘round.”

“And what there is goes to friends and relatives, it’s the same everywhere.”

“The theatre isn’t what it was.”

“No. And I’ll tell you something else. It never was… what it was.”

(The scene is at 8:30 here, if you want to watch it for free.)

This is one of the first iterations of a motif that runs through the series: never forget you’re watching a story. The series opens with narration by Claudius late in his reign, writing his memoirs and relaying events that happened before he was born, in case it wasn’t clear that what we’re seeing lies somewhere between fact and fiction. These are British actors in the 1970s portraying fictionalized versions of (mostly) real people who lived over a thousand years before, adapted from two books by Robert Graves who picked the juiciest morsels from primary sources that were often relaying secondhand tales, gossip, and propaganda. The low-fi quality of the makeup, sets, props, and film stock has gone from merely adding camp to a serving as a stamp of analog authenticity. I rewatched the whole series in 2020, to keep my mind occupied during the long nights of the first COVID wave, which for me adds yet another layer of associated-memory onto the show’s time-onion. (Later, I listened to the I, Podius podcast, which recaps each episode — a funny concept for a show that aired about 47 years ago — and found myself once again wanting to rewatch it.)

I wonder, now, if the many original British and American viewers of I, Claudius appreciated the story about a powerful, global empire reduced to a state of moral and structural decay through the avarice, pride, and myopia of its rulers — as that was also their contemporary world? Or is that just me, projecting my own illusory vector backwards from my foreground position back towards the horizon, seeing a line where none exists? Was it never what it was?

After the Greek orator is finished, Augustus pulls him aside to thank him. “What a gift you Greeks have! Incidentally, you know — the battle, it wasn’t like that. But you described it poetically, I understand! You used poetic license. I’m used to that!” It never was what it was. All histories are imaginary histories.

Story of the EYE (I)

In September 2022 I spent a full week in a hospital bed in Boston. My head was wired to an EEG machine that was constantly monitored by someone I couldn’t see, though I could see my own brainwaves on a large screen on the other side of my small room. To my left was a large window displaying on a slab of roof and another tower of rooms across from mine. I could only leave my bed if the nurse was present, which meant I was prone almost the entire time. By the time I was discharged I found I had to re-learn how to walk as my legs un-stiffened and my equilibrium recalibrated to keep me standing.

A ride-share driver guided me through the afternoon traffic to my train station. The sky was gray with rain but everything pulsed with color. I could try to describe it, or you could scroll back up and imagine the esplanade along the Charles River glowing like a fresco by Filippino Lippi after he had seen the Domus Aurea. I had turned 48 years old during my hospital stay and here I was learning how to walk and how to see again.

The goal of my visit was to solve the mystery of a series of seizures I suffered over the last three years, the first of which almost killed me. I got no answers, but I did get a clue that perhaps what was happening to me was some combination of the mental and the physical. This led me to wonder if it was related to my autism, which I had been assessed for a few months prior. That in turn led me to read the book Unmasking Autism, by Devon Price. Price lays out how autistic people create “masks", i.e. personae that function to fake their way through everyday life. My persona “Ryan,” for example, is a work of art - almost a work of fiction, except so much of him was crafted by mirroring others and trying to anticipate their expectations. “Ryan” is outgoing, witty, polite, comfortable in groups, self-effacing, socially functioning. But “Ryan” is an appendage of another being, a grotesque animal without a true name but for our sake we’ll call it EYE. EYE puts on the “Ryan” mask as needed; has been doing so since EYE was a child. But after so many years of use it started to crack and peel. Like so many other things, the pandemic sped up its decay like a time-lapse film.

It took me a long time to make it through Unmasking Autism because I would read a passage like this:

Though masking is incredibly taxing and causes us a lot of existential turmoil, it’s rewarded and facilitated by neurotypical people. Masking makes Autistic people easier to “deal” with. It renders us compliant and quiet. It also traps us. Once you’ve proven yourself capable of suffering in silence, neurotypical people tend to expect you’ll be able to do it forever, no matter the cost. Being a well-behaved Autistic person puts us in a real double bind and forces many of us to keep masking for far longer (and far more pervasively) than we want to.

And this:

Therapy that is focused on battling “irrational beliefs,” such as cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), doesn’t work as well on Autistic people as it does on neurotypicals. … One reason for that is many of the fears and inhibitions of Autistic people are often entirely reasonable, and rooted in a lifetime of painful experiences. We tend to be pretty rational people, and many of us are already inclined to analyze our thoughts and feelings very closely (sometimes excessively so). Autistics don’t need cognitive behavioral training to help us not be ruled by our emotions. In fact, most of us have been browbeaten into ignoring our feelings too much.

… and I would have to pause to take a breath or calm down. I would get deeply angry thinking about all the years I spent trying to inhabit a skin that wasn’t really mine and never could, or should, have been. I was suddenly very defensive of the young EYE who could never feel a sense of peace between the bullying, the dismissal, or the praise that backfired. I realized that I had embraced Zen Buddhism when I was 15 because I thought it would teach me ego death, since killing my sense of self felt like a way to commit virtual suicide, faking my own death to myself so that nothing could touch me. But nothing could touch “me” anyway, since EYE was inside the carapace of “Ryan,” afraid to come out. I can forgive myself, though, which makes forgiveness for anyone else irrelevant.

My anger passed through me and I was left with the resolve to let myself be changed this time. I had to stop trying to swat away those beams of time that kept trying to converge on my location, let them illuminate me and I will see with my EYE open for a change. Some of that is middle age too, of course, the perspective of knowing that there’s more years behind me than in front of me. But like we said, we experience time all together, always in the foreground. Everything (everywhere?) all at once.

Story of the EYE (II)

Eye in the Egg [Silm Munas], by Ülo Sooster.

In “The Past is a Grotesque Animal,” Kevin Barnes/Georgie Fruit sings:

I fell in love with the first cute girl that I met
Who could appreciate Georges Bataille
Standing at Swedish festival
Discussing "Story of the Eye"

I discovered an English translation of Bataille’s Story of the Eye (L'histoire de l'œil) when I was 17, purely by chance at the public library in the town where I grew up. (It was this edition; in part I was taken by the cover, which freaked me out.) At first glance it looked like a long, disturbing series of viscerally disgusting sexual fantasies, but there was something in its relentless description of bodily functions that made me wonder if I was falling into a trap by reading it all too literally. I re-read it and sure enough without the shock factor, actual themes emerged from the viscera. It never was what it was, it was something more.

An early motif is the character Simone’s obsession with eggs. This comes back at the end of the book, when she is transfixed by the face of a dead priest (which the main characters have killed) when a fly briefly lands on his open, lifeless eyeball. Then there’s this brief moment (translated from the French by Joachim Neugroschel):

She [Simone] made me come over to the corpse: she knelt down and completely opened the eye that the fly had perched on.

“Do you see the eye [l’oeil]?” she asked me.

“Well?”

“It’s an egg [l'oeuf],” she concluded in all simplicity.

There’s something symbolically wonderful and physically gross about the idea of an eye, or an EYE, being both an organ of observation and generation. Another grotesque combination! Perhaps the EYE has seen enough, has incubated for long enough, perhaps something will yet claw its way free. The past is a grotesque animal, and in its EYE you see how completely wrong you could be. But then again, all histories, including the history of the EYE, are imaginary histories. If it never was what it was, who knows what it will possibly be?

Archives and the Fruits of Crime

Short stories about malfeasances of memory

Note: this was originally posted on my Substack on September 9, 2022. I deleted that Substack a couple years ago and I’m reposting these so they don’t get lost.

Ancient Sumerian clay tablet. The earliest of these were created about 3200 BCE. The vast majority of them are financial records. So many were created that about half a million to two million have survived to the present, though only about 10,000 have been translated.

Stairway to Heaven

From 2011 to 2019 I taught a class called Introduction to Archival Management and Services (i.e. Archives 101) at the Simmons University College of Organizational, Computational, and Information Sciences. Most of my job was trying to keep the exhausted grad students alert from 6:00 to 9:00 PM once a week. The capstone assignment was the “Process Yourself Project.” Each student chose material that they created or owned; this was their collection. The had to take these items and write a finding aid for it — an overall description that a hypothetical patron would use to access their collection. It was a way for them to show their ability to appraise, organize, and describe documents and artifacts from their own life history. Usually archivists never meet the donors of any given collection; in this case the student was the donor. For some students the experience of going back over the traces of their lives was profound — they were mostly in their in their 20s, used to facing forward not looking backwards.

I was flexible about what constituted a “collection,” as long as they could write a finding aid and provide context I would accept it. One student wrote a whole finding aid about his Magic: the Gathering card collection. Another student asked if she could catalog her father’s collection of Led Zeppelin vinyl record albums. Her father had recently died and the two of them had been re-connecting the last couple years, bonding over his favorite music. Make sure to give the context, I said. Give the release years, catalog numbers, etc., but let people understand why this collection exists, what it means to you. Make them comprehend how these songs are the sounds of your memories.

Bring it On Home

One of 25 diaries of Joseph Jenkins (1818-1898), a Welsh farm laborer who immigrated to Canada, then returned to Wales. His writings, in English and Welsh, include both his poetry and his detailed everyday observations. Original at State Library of Victoria, Canada.

At the repository where I work most of the collections are based around individuals, what we call “personal papers.”  Archival repositories in general are built to house institutional records and want little to do with personal papers.  The problem with personal papers: archives use standardized language to describe their material the way libraries do.  But applying a set of standard bibliographic categories to a bound volume — a tidy packet of information — is one thing. Any given letter might touch on numerous different subjects; what is it “about”?  A diary might include observations about the weather, important appointments, pressed flowers, quotes from other writers, or all or none of those.  

Cataloging always conceals as much as it reveals.  This slipperiness is a problem for the students and historians who try to study material culture and, in the words of E.P. Thompson, “history from below.”  Letters, diaries, mementos, and other “non-records” are exactly what these scholars are looking for, but because they’re difficult to describe they’re difficult to find.  Everybody wants archivists to digitize as much as possible of this kind of material because in theory it’s easier to access.  But that doesn’t solve the description problem, and it often makes it worse.  “Digitizing personal papers” usually means disaggregating material that has been physically grouped together — often by the creator and/or donor, so that the arrangement itself can be significant context — into numerous discrete digital objects, each of which each needs a base level of decent-quality descriptive metadata in order to be discoverable by online search and browse functions.  The limited access of personal papers isn’t just analog vs. digital, it’s the limits of descriptive language and even language in general.

In My Time of Dying

An example of cross-writing from the mid-19th century. This was done to save on the cost of paper and postage.

Archivists who work with the collections of individual people are professional hauntologists. We deal in traces left behind by people who mostly never imagined the surviving evidence of their existence would be boxed, cataloged, and curated. Personal papers can include quotidian objects everyone accumulates: diaries, journals, photo albums, letters, postcards, souvenirs, children’s drawings, maybe a pocket watch, some clothing, family Bibles, mementos and “ephemera.”  One of our collections includes two bullets (possibly) dug out from the corpse of a soldier killed in World War I, kept by his grieving mother. Inhabiting this residue is like looking into a little abandoned room. Processing a whole collection can feel like temporarily possessing someone else’s body.

Institutional records on the other hand are selectively chosen and carefully pruned by archivists and records managers. “Personal” records, i.e. anything created by an individual for their own private use, are weeded out as much as possible. It’s not always an easy call to make but the policies and procedures for stewarding these records are standardized and comprehensive. Trouble creeps in when you can’t distinguish between personal and institutional records — when a person is the institution — like the Executive Office of the President.

Houses of the Holy

National Archives and Records Administration, Washington DC. NARA was created by FDR in 1934, expanded under the General Services Administration in 1949, and became its own agency in 1984.

Most US Presidents since Franklin D. Roosevelt have donated their papers to the US in the form of Presidential Libraries, a system started when FDR donated his records in 1939. Every President from Hoover through Obama has their own Presidential Library. Most Americans think that (a) this donation is compulsory; (b) the libraries are, for the most part, politically neutral, designed to teach history, not propaganda. Neither of these are true.

Prior to the Presidential Records Act of 1978, all Presidential records were legally the private property of that President. FDR could have kept his papers to himself, but he decided to donate them to the National Archives and Records Administration. This set a public precedent for the next few Presidents, though privately they more or less hated it.

This gentleperson’s agreement was torched by Richard M. Nixon. On his way out the door from his resignation in disgrace he decided he would use his papers’ status as his personal property to keep them for himself and mostly destroy them. Congressional legislators realized they had no way to stop him so they hurriedly passed the Presidential Recordings and Materials Preservation Act of 1974, which only applies to Nixon’s papers. The PRA was broader, converting all Presidential records from public to private and ensuring at least some public access to inactive records using the 1966 Freedom of Information Act (with the usual nine exceptions). The specific procedure for transferring the records wasn’t fully codified until 1989 by Reagan administration. George W. Bush’s administration struck this down in November 2001 and replaced it with an order locking down both Presidential and Vice Presidential records, in line with their general disdain for public access. Obama reverted the PRA back to the Reagan guidelines in 2009, which meant material that had been declassified under Reagan and re-classified under W was again declassified.

Presidential papers might be public records but Presidential Libraries aren’t public institutions. When Truman decided to follow FDR’s example with his own papers, his administration created a system whereby private endowments front the money for the library building while civil servants preserve, catalog, and administer access to the actual records. The exhibits are also determined by the private foundations, which by definition are set up by supporters of the various Presidents. This leads to some straight-up propaganda like the “Decision Points Theater” exhibit in the George W. Bush library. The exhibit gives you various Presidential choices to make and shows you the potential consequences of your decision, along with what GWB actually did; if you decide that going to war in Iraq was the wrong choice, the exhibit responds with “sorry, wrong answer! Try again!” So you can imagine the bullshit that will fill the Trump Presidential Library.

(As a side note, trying to get access to the records of the Office of Presidential Libraries is practically impossible, despite those records being public. The OPL didn’t want their records subject to NARA’s retention schedule, so they just stopped sending them to NARA circa 1964. That puts them in the category of “operational” records and thus unavailable to the public.)

Trampled Under Foot

FBI search warrant for Mar-a-Lago, August 11, 2022.

What makes Trump’s attitude towards his Presidential records is, as usual, his brazen honesty about the fact that the American Chief Executive is bound by no rules. When he was done reading a memo, a letter, or anything else, he would rip it up and throw it on the floor or sometimes in the trash. We now know he would flush papers down the toilet, despite his lies to the contrary. This was obviously against the PRA but to say that Trump didn’t give a damn is an understatement.

His aides are always happy to enable Trump so they scooped up his refuse and sent it to NARA, where it was the thankless job of two NARA records management analysts, Soloman Lartey and Reginald Young, Jr., to literally Scotch tape the fragments back together so they could be filed. In Spring 2018 they were both fired without warning; maybe Trump or his people realized what they were doing they told NARA’s head of human resources to get rid of them. But maybe they were just victims of the 2018 purge of civil servants by Trump.

Good Times, Bad Times

Draft memo by CIA Director George H.W. Bush, 1976. Bush was responding to Bella Abzug’s concern about the CIA purging its records. The Agency rewrote this to say the CIA would act ““in accordance with Presidential directives and as permitted by law” but this memo reflects their actual proprietary stance towards their own records.

Trump isn’t the first President to bury or destroy his own records. It’s common knowledge by now that Warren G. Harding was a sex maniac; his family managed to keep Harding’s letters to one of his mistresses under seal for as long as they could. When Republicans howled over Hillary Clinton’s private email server during her run, Democrats retorted that nobody in the GOP cared when George W. Bush’s staff deleted about 22 million emails instead of sending them to NARA. When NARA’s security office told Dick Cheney to hand over his Vice Presidential records, Cheney ignored them, then decided it would be simpler to abolish the security office. In 2003, Sandy Berger, a National Security Adviser under the Clinton Administration, stuffed a bunch of classified documents into his clothes and walked out of the NARA facility with them.

Then there’s the garden-variety restriction and/or destruction of records by various US government bodies. For example: soon after it came out that the CIA were running secret prisons in Eastern Europe, they destroyed ninety videotapes of their officers torturing captives. Bush’s White House Counsel Gina Haspel ordered their destruction; in 2018 she was named director of the CIA and retired comfortably in 2021.

Candy Store Rock

Book and manuscript dealer Glenn Horowitz being led into court, July 2022. Creator: Gabriella Bass | Credit: Gabriella Bass for NY Post.

Apart from the officially sanctioned crimes against archives, there’s an economy of rare books and manuscripts that operates in the shadows: purchases from dealers who don’t ask many questions about provenance by wealthy private collectors building their treasure hoards. (In this shadow economy museums are in a class by themselves since so much of their holdings are stolen.) In this grey zone, forgeries and fraud are rampant. Phil Collins, an obsessive collector of material about Texas and The Alamo, was probably conned into purchasing large amounts of forgeries from a historian and an antiquities dealer working together. Mark Hoffman made a whole career out of forging documents about the LDS Church. Even the venerable auction houses Christie’s and Sotheby’s colluded to artificially inflate market prices — since the value of any given book or manuscript, as with any other commodity, is only worth as much as the most someone is willing to pay for it.

There’s a long list of thieves that have stolen from NARA. Maps are particularly valuable to collectors, so thieves like Gilbert Bland and Edward Forbes Smiley III are the reason many private map collections exist. Barry Landau stole thousands of Presidential documents and artifacts partly for the money and partly for his love of collecting. The FBI created the Art Crime Team in 2005 because of the high level of international theft. The FBI steps in if: the material is over 100 years old and valued over $5,000; or under 100 years old and valued over $100,000. They also maintain a National Stolen Art File of items valued over $2,000, but of course these are only the items they know about.

In addition to this dark economy, there’s an open, legal economy of papers and archives. A donor can get their collection appraised at a certain value, donate that material to a repository as a gift, and take a tax deduction for the amount on the appraisal. The only catch is you can’t donate your own personal papers this way and the repository can’t hire the appraiser. If you’re a private collector with some valuable material, you can use this system to create your own tax loophole — just keep donating highly-appraised material every year and watch your taxable income go down. If you don’t care about the tax implications and you want to give your own papers to an archive — but not for free — you can sell them to the highest bidder. The record for sales is currently the University of Tulsa buying Bob Dylan’s papers for between $15 to $20 million (George Kaiser and his Kaiser Family Foundation chipped in a large amount of that). On the other side, if an archive is willing to pay top dollar it can engage in multi-million dollar buying sprees for major collections, like Thomas Staley did to get the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin some of the most prestigious archival collections in the world.

Brokering these deals snags a nice payday for the middleman. If they do it right, they quietly build up a reputation with the right people while mostly keeping their own name out of the news; discretion is extremely important to private collectors and large institutions alike. If they get too cocky or greedy, they can end up in jail like Glenn Horowitz, dealer to the gentry of the super-rich. Trying to convince Don Henley to buy his own stolen documents from you is a bold move! So is claiming that you got them as a present from Glenn Frey, who happens to be dead!

There’s yet another economy of archival information and cultural heritage, a more recent development that operates on a giant scale. These are companies like Clarivate, Adam Matthew Digital, and Ancestry.com. Clarivate and Adam Matthew repackage digitized material and sell those packages as proprietary products, such as educational resources or databases of newspapers and other periodicals. In the case of Clarivate, they own the rights to their databases, so if you want your library users to have access to their digital material prepare to subscribe to their services. They don’t say how much they charge, but in 2021 they made hundreds of millions of dollars. Ancestry.com is notorious for putting public records like death indexes and genealogical records behind a paywall. In order for these companies to exist you need low-wage labor to digitize the material, loopholes in intellectual property that allow for proprietary platforms to do mass distribution, and the Internet. One insidious development of this economy is the recent emergence of marginalized groups finding their own records secured behind paywalls and trademarks so these companies can claim to be more diverse.

Immigrant Song

Memo from the FBI, part of the COINTELPRO operation, to informants instigating a split between the Black Panther Party and the Students for a Democratic Society, September 23, 1969.

The truly dark economy of records has almost nothing to do with money. Instead it deals in social control and naked power. Official bureaucratic records have been used to discipline and punish various groups for centuries, with archives playing their role to preserve these weaponized records.

The aftermath of World War II gave rise to a giant international legal structure designed to control large displaced populations trying to move between national borders, especially those trying to enter Western Europe or North America. This system merged organically with a growing public-private surveillance apparatus that ballooned after 9/11 and hasn’t stopped expanding. Archives and archival theory play crucial roles in the maintenance of this American bureaucratic panopticon.

Internally, one of the largest archives of domestic surveillance is the archive of the Federal Bureau of Investigation at NARA. The FBI even has a searchable website of publicly available records, selected from the hundreds of boxes of records. But the FBI’s most valuable, though unintentional, contribution to American history are its COINTELPRO files. Their carefully documented hounding of various groups and public figures makes for a trove of primary sources, as long as you keep in mind that much of the information comes from unreliable informants — usually criminals — and disgruntled agents. Also disturbing is the fact that many subjects of the FBI’s attention have no idea that a file on them exists, nor is there a way for them to get the Bureau to seal or purge their file.

Just as sinister are the records kept, or not kept, by US Customs and Border Patrol. CBS of course has a long tradition of records as a way to keep out refugees, asylum seekers, or anyone else they want, often brutally and sometimes in open defiance of the US government.

Archivist Anne J. Gilliland sums it up this way:

Those who have never undergone the profoundly destabilizing experience of migration, especially as a result of forced displacement, may not have had to think very much or very often about how or why or even where records are kept or adjudicated or how they might have a crucial effect on their own lives and wellbeing or those of family members or loved ones who are with or are separated from them. They may not have experienced linguistic or procedural confusion, literary challenges, dread or even flashbacks when confronted with having to fill in an official form. they may not have experienced similar affect when having to write a letter to an official agency in the country of settlement, whose bureaucratic processes may be steeped in different language and cultural norms, or even to an agency in the country from which they fled; when having to interact with a document that is replete with the language, script, and symbolism of those who oppressed them; or when they are required or challenged to produce identity documentation. … Archival theory insists upon the arrangement and description of records in accordance with the authority, agent or function (“provenance”) responsible for their creation and accumulation and thus emphasizes and reinforces not only the categorizations but also the power of the agency or state.

When it comes to the CBP’s own records, they are eager to destroy them and/or shield them from NARA and automatically destroy them.

What Is and What Should Never Be

“First girl attendants on the day they were received after having been ‘changed,’” June 19, 1923; Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, National Archives.

There are archives that are victims of crimes, there are archives that perpetrate crimes, and there are archives which exist because of crimes.

The history of the US, like the history of most Great Powers, contains a long chain of atrocities going back to America’s origins as a nation founded on enslavement. Some of these atrocities and injustices, like the American Indian Treaties, have reams of documentation, with others, like records regarding slave ships, are relatively rare. Even when records do exist, like the thousands of documents generated by centuries of American slavery, the people who are the subject of those records remain hard to grasp because of the bureaucratic and archival insistence on making surnames and birth dates markers of identity. Speaking of which, white Americans love researching their genealogy — especially using Ancestry.com and DNA sampling — in part because having an immigrant-based identity allows them to slip out of their complicity with white supremacy when it’s convenient for them. On the other hand, white supremacists are obsessed with using genetic ancestry tests to prove their whiteness without a doubt — which doesn’t work because whiteness is a social category, not a biological one. Meanwhile Ancestry.com’s services makes it almost impossible to find out if one’s ancestors owned slaves or were involved in the slave trade.

Some archives of atrocities are hidden in plain sight. When historian James Jones was researching the Tuskegee Syphilis Study for his book Bad Blood, he happened to discover US government records about the Tuskegee study at NARA while researching a different topic altogether. This was in 1969; “needless to say,” he wrote, “I did not know that the experiment was still going on.” In another case of human experimentation, the papers of John C. Cutler were processed and described at the University of Pittsburgh and restricted until after shortly after his death. Cutler was one of the lead doctors conducting the Guatemala syphilis experiments; his papers consisted of government records (which he stole) about the US Public Health Service intentionally infecting prisoners, soldiers, and asylum inmates with the disease in order to see how it would spread through the general population. Other collections document the Japanese-American internment camps operating during World War II and the Indian Boarding Schools, though the latter collections are full of gaps and lost records.

The issue of Black historical archives captured by predominantly white institutions would double the size of this piece, so I’ll have to you give a quote from the incredible Dorothy Berry, the Digital Curator for the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture:

Academics continuously loosen the concept of the archives in vigorous debate and flowery speech, while hundreds of linear feet of Black history are stacked in secure shelving, unbeknownst and inaccessible to implicated communities. “Why do we even have this?” is a recurring question whispered across institutions as complex histories of provenance and acquisitions lead to single box collections with titles like “Miscellaneous Slavery Documents,” a collection of Freedman’s Bureau papers and Bills of Sale I recently encountered. In the face of this guilt-inducing backlog, special collections have turned towards digitization as a solution, prioritizing getting images of Black people online and hoping that will be enough. I’ve commiserated with colleagues about demands to streamline digitization with the feeling that getting things online will increase access- even without full description or detailed metadata, the things that guide digital discovery. Digital collection development has been presented as a liberatory access provider, with the idea that reparative access is primarily a workflow adjustment. 

There is an idea born equally from the enormous backlogs of patron requests and from idealism. If everything is digitized, regardless of metadata or image quality, the resulting hoard would solve a host of issues. Researcher discomfort in dealing with racially insensitive reading room staff? Solved. Physical awareness of marginalized status being the only Black person in the building? Solved. Criticisms that existing digital collections are too White? Immediately solved, with references. No longer would there need to be as heavy a focus on the White-supremacy inflected structures of archival repositories- those issues can be fixed in their own time, and researchers can safely access content at home. … Institutional possessors of primarily Black collections obfuscate access through rules and roadblocks of their own design.

If this subject interests you, you should absolutely read her entire essay.

Dazed and Confused

“Silent Sam” pro-slavery statue toppled in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, August 15, 2017.

The atrocity archives create headaches for the academic institutions that house them, especially because so many American institutions of higher learning were either funded by blood money, built on stolen land, or both. Perusing their own university archives too closely would force an unwelcome reckoning with their own legacy. Universities hate being caught between the modern forces of capital and their original charter to create knowledge and further social mobility. On the other hand, they also hate institutional self-critique that might drive away potential big donors and alumni boosters.

University archives tend to embarrass higher-ed institutions founded on white supremacy. The Julian Shakespeare Carr Papers, Southern Historical Collection, The Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill contain the text of his speech at the unveiling and dedication of the confederate monument “Silent Sam,” placed on the UNC campus by the Daughters of the Confederacy, on June 2, 1913. The loquacious speech praised the Confederacy to the heavens. Then there was this passage:

I trust I may be pardoned for one allusion, howbeit it is rather personal. One hundred yards from where we stand, less than ninety days perhaps after my return from Appomattox, I horse-whipped a negro wench until her skirts hung in shreds, because upon the streets of this quiet village she had publicly insulted and maligned a Southern lady, and then rushed for protection to these University buildings where was stationed a garrison of 100 Federal soldiers. I performed the pleasing duty in the immediate presence of the entire garrison, and for thirty nights afterwards slept with a double-barrel shot gun under my head.

When this came to light in 2017 the students were so disgusted they tore down the Silent Sam statue itself shortly afterwards. The Carr Papers, as noted above, are part of the Southern Historical Collection, a renowned archival resource collected and maintained by avowed white supremacist J.G. de Roulhac Hamilton. Hamilton has a campus building named in his honor, though that may soon change. Changing a building’s name is a welcome gesture but it also happens to be good PR. Harvard University’s public apology and promise of reparations might be genuine and is admirable. It also poses no reputational risk to Harvard, unlike, say, an examination of their current relationships with war criminals.

Some schools lost large portions of their research collections after the passage of the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), which requires any institution that receives federal funding to return “cultural items” like “human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony” to their rightful indigenous owners. In response, some university archives and museums decided to simply hand-wave NAGPRA away. Other schools have ghoulishly held on to human remains in their archives. Some of these collections are remnants of “race science” and physical anthropology, like the Morton Collection of a thousand human skulls. Then there are the stolen bones of two children killed in the 1985 MOVE bombing in Philadelphia, used as teaching materials.

Gallows Pole

Richard Barnett in the office of Congressional House Speaker Nancy Pelosi with his boot on some government records, January 6, 2021. He later bragged about stealing mail from the office. Creator: Saul Loeb | Credit: AFP via Getty Images.

Trump understands that being in trouble is a fake idea. People who get mad about rule-breaking can’t understand why Trump keeps getting away with everything. He’ll get away with this too. There is almost no one on Earth, especially no one in America, willing to even try to impose rules on the President of the US, much less when it comes to respect for proper government documentation procedure. He’ll get away with selling the details of Israel’s nuclear program to Saudi Arabia (which is likely what he did) because he broke a rule and no one can or will do anything about it. From an archives point of view, though, it’s a perfect scandal. It combines the scramble of personal and Presidential papers; disdain for the PRA; historical documents as fungible commodities; destruction of public records; the archives of the national security state; and institutions embarrassed by the content of their own collections.

The people who aren’t getting away with it are the rioters who wrecked the Capitol building in 2021. They were such good archivists, proudly documenting their crimes for posterity, in real time. Another archive of crime, created by criminals, to document the greatest crime of their lives. [Editorial correction from 2026: for the most part they did actually get away with it.]

Night Flight

Photograph of the crash site (the black smudge in the center) of the SpaceIL Beresheet rocket, April 2019.

In 2018, SpaceX successfully launched their Falcon Heavy rocket into space. The rocket needed a test payload, so in a monument to Elon Musk’s pathological ego they used the first Tesla Roadster his company ever sold. SpaceX dumped the car into an orbit around the sun, theoretically to travel through space for millions of years. Tucked in the glove compartment of the Roadster is a high-tech optical disk loaded with a digital copy of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy. Will some far-future civilization be using CD-ROMs? Regardless, four years into it’s 30-million-year journey the Roadster is falling apart, so at some point the disk will either fall into the sun or fly off into the void.

The Asimov disk is a creation of the Arch Mission Foundation, a futurist-utopian project of Nova Spivack who is fixated on the idea of creating multiple “archives” of all human knowledge and shooting them into space. In 2019, Spivack funded his own moon shot, using a SpaceIL Beresheet lunar lander built by Israel Aerospace Industries. The rocket would be the first private spacecraft to land on the lunar surface, and its payload would be “Billion Year Archive,” aka the Lunar Library (tm). Unlike the Asimov disk, the BYA uses analog technology — high-res, nano-scale images engraved onto 25 micron-thick layers of nickel, viewable through a microscope with 1000x magnification. Layers 1 through 4 hold 60,000 images of book pages, looking something like an old microfiche loaded with thousands of novels, textbooks, Wikipedia (in English), hair follicles and blood samples from Spivack and few other people (to include human DNA), and weirdest of all a few thousand dehydrated tardigrades. To be useful, future humans would have to (1) somehow rebuild civilization after the coming climate collapse (2) find and process the massive amounts of fossil fuel needed to shoot a manned rocket to the moon, and (3) find the disk — because right before it was supposed to land on the lunar surface Beresheet crashed. Spivack is positive that the disk somehow survived and has planned to deliver a second installment of the Lunar Library (tm) as a hitchhiker on the Astrobotic Peregrine Mission One lander in 2022.

The Song Remains the Same

Version of the textual warning at the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste facility, part of a design to keep visitors away for the next 10,000 years. For context, 10,000 years ago Homo sapiens was just starting to learn agriculture.

Shooting these info-disks into space feels like a tacit admission that Homo sapiens’ time on Earth is drawing to a close and we need to leave a suicide note behind. It’s also part of a long tradition of wealthy and powerful men leaving monuments to themselves intended to keep their fame alive for all future generations. The survival of the monuments testifies to the superiority of analog records over digital technology.

That brings me back where I started: the Sumerian clay tablets and the personal papers. People in the Internet age have a general anxiety about the records of our recent history becoming inaccessible or just disappearing. They’re not wrong! Digital records sacrifice longevity for portability. But archivists understand that all memory is mortal and what’s remembered is defined by what's forgotten. It’s an accident that thousands of Sumerian contracts, jokes, and squabbles can still be read centuries later while the original footage of the 1969 moon landing was almost lost forever. Time isn’t selective in how it winnows. Archivists like me are the janitors of history, sweeping up what remains, cleaning things up as best we can, doing it again, and again, and again.

I Hope This Well Finds You

Going to the well for redemption and revolution

Note: This was originally posted to my old Substack back on November 13, 2021. I deleted that Substack a few years ago so I’m reposting these old blogs so they don’t get lost.

Disclaimer: most of this text is about Martin Luther King, Jr., and racial justice in America. I’m a middle-aged White man who has never experienced racial discrimination and never will. I would understand if you think it’s presumptuous or misguided of me to write about these topics as someone whose role should be primarily to listen, not talk. So I have grounded my thoughts in the words of Dr. King. You will judge if I succeeded in speaking with humility and in a spirit of amplification, not self-importance.

Hello and Holla

The word "hello" always bothered me because no one seemed to know what it meant. Every time I answered the phone or greeted someone a little language-imp perched on my shoulder, wrinkling its nose. What was I saying? I finally asked my seventh grade English teacher what hello meant. She was both faintly amused and vaguely pained. It's just what people say when they greet each other, she said. But what did it actually mean? We went around for a while until she understood that I wanted to know what the content of hello was. "Rock" means a rock and "red" means a color. So what is a "hello"? At this point my teacher was suddenly very busy, looking down at her papers and shuffling them intently, indicating that she deeply desired me to be anywhere else at that moment. should be headed somewhere else.

Hullo and Ahoy

The etymology of "hello" doesn't help, but it does tell you that the modern English word "hello" comes from an older French form spelled "holla," meaning "hold up" (close to the British "what's all this then"). When Missy Elliot shouts holla! in the middle of Get Ur Freak On she's using old French to say "whoa there!" When we say it on the phone it's because Thomas Edison was once startled by his phone ringing and blurted out something that sounded like "hullo!" and it stuck. Alexander Graham Bell liked to say "ahoy" when he answered the phone. As if the person calling was a vessel passing through thick fog, trying to hail you through the darkness, hoping for a response.

Evocations and Salutations

Some words describe and some words evoke. They can summon powerful and frightening spirits into the world, who cleave reality apart, into what was real before the words were used and what is real in the aftermath. "I now pronounce you wed"; "this has been declared an unlawful assembly"; "you are under arrest"; "I hereby sentence you"; "fire". But some evocations are gentle gestures of affection and friendship, like salutations and closings in correspondence. "Dear X"; "best regards"; "yours most sincerely." Salutations and closings persist in our emails, the way the save icon for MS Word is still a 3.5 inch floppy disk and how fact we call digital objects "files." It's a horseless carriage effect -- misapplying our old familiar words to newborn technology, using our comprehended past to brace ourselves against the incomprehensible present.

I Hope This Finds You Well

Back in the late 1990s, beginning an email with "Dear X" was, I believed, what you were supposed to do if you were writing to anybody over 30. Our Elders disdained email as shabby and informal (or so we heard) so to placate them we wrote electronic mail messages as if they were magical missives washed up from the ocean-sized Information Superhighway. Thirty years later those emails read like they were scribed on parchment by a quill pen daubed in iron-gall ink flitting above a candle-lit writing desk. Finding the right register for an email is somehow distressing and a dull chore. It it's too officious ("X, the memo is attached") it scans as icy or angry; too effusive ("Hi X!!") and it looks close to madness. So we compromise with standard openings. And there is one of these that everybody hates: "I hope this finds you well." Maybe because it's 2021 and no one who isn't unbelievably rich and powerful is physically and/or mentally well. Maybe because it feels like it goes even farther and projects stoicism onto the recipient -- hope you are keeping that upper lip stiff! Maybe the sender has to earn the right to claim hope before they can proclaim it to you in an email salutation.

I Hope This Well Finds You

There's something inherently sacred about a well, and humans have always known it. Every culture on earth has a version of holy wells, going back farther than we have written records. The most dried-out, used-up well keeps enough magic for itself that people use it to make wishes. Even the roots of the word "well" are tangled up with the word "wish" because both words meant abundance and satisfaction. There’s something mysterious about a well, a straw piercing the rind of the earth. Isn't it nice to think that we each have a well somewhere? Waiting to bring us abundance and satisfaction? Maybe you already found yours and draw from it every day. If you haven't found yours yet, I hope your well finds you. I hope this well finds you.

I am an Archivist

I've been a professional archivist at Boston University for about 20 years. My official title is Assistant Director for Manuscripts, which my daughter likes because it "sounds witchy." An archival repository consists of collections, aka papers; these collections can be made up of almost anything: drafts, notes, letters, journals, media (photographs, audio/video etc.), artwork, textiles, newspapers, even digital objects. Archival collections are enchanting because their contents are usually unique and irreplaceable in a global economy built on mass production, reproduction, consumption, and disposal. (But even modern garbage can be a historical collection.) What the creator or collector of the material chose to keep in the papers, what they discarded, and how they arranged everything — all these choices are also unique to that collection. Researchers treasure archival collections because they offer access to things that are hidden, insights into the process. Archives aren’t for information retrieval, they’re for knowledge production. That’s a rare thing in a data-science-society that values aggregation not inspiration.

The Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers

The collection I work with the most is the Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers. I was the project supervisor on a major re-cataloging project on the papers in 2007-2009, and I'm the only staff member from that project still remaining at BU who worked on it. The finding aid (which is what archivists call inventories or catalogs) for the King papers describes every scrap of paper in the entire collection. The papers only go from the early 1950s -- when he was a graduate student studying for his doctorate at the BU School of Theology -- to about 1963. They're not comprehensive, and there are other major King collections out there, especially at Morehouse College in Atlanta. BU's King Papers stop right before the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, held on August 28, 1963 in Washington, DC. Which is what I really wanted to talk about.

Improvising the Dream

Part of my job is to answer people's questions about our collections, and one of the most common questions I get is: do you have Dr. King's original draft of the "I Have a Dream" speech he gave at the March on Washington? Imagine if we could unveil his thought-process on that! We don't have it; nobody has it because it doesn't exist. No single draft survives. The March was such a huge undertaking that MLK barely had any time to prepare any remarks at all. What everyone really wants to see is the original draft of the section that starts with "I have a dream," but one of the greatest feats of oratory in American history was improvised. A common story about how it happened: as he approached the end of his written text, the voice of the legendary Mahalia Jackson rang out. One of the greatest gospel singers of all time and a close friend to MLK, she had preceded his speech singing an old, old spiritual, "I've Been 'Buked and I've Been Scorned," about holding on to your faith and hope against an entire world whose fuel is your sweat and blood. "Tell them about the dream Martin!" she cried. Some words describe and some words evoke. Speeches and sermons are obviously forcible evocations.  “I Have a Dream” was so powerful American space-time has curved itself around it ever since.

Inward and Outward Prophecy

IHAD is a prophecy. Prophetic language is an ancient method of evocation, in two styles: inward and outward. Inward prophecy addresses the self and the past, calling the people who have fallen into faithlessness back to the principles they have forsaken.

In an early section of IHAD, MLK says:

In a sense we've come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the "unalienable Rights" of "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note, insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked "insufficient funds." But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so, we've come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.

This is MLK’s inward prophecy: The state and the citizens of the United States strayed from the justice promised at the moment of national creation. His demand is redemption.

Outward prophecy looks to society and the future; it widens the horizon of possibility to brings the principles into our shared material reality — the dream of making a just world in our present life.

MLK immediately follows the section above with this:

It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment. This sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. Nineteen sixty-three is not an end, but a beginning. And those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. And there will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.

This is MLK’s outward prophecy, a new world that won’t be delayed or denied any longer. His demand is revolution. MLK had recently made this demand already in his Letter from Birmingham Jail, published two months before the March on Washington. (Another text with no surviving original draft, probably because there was no single original draft.)

Dr. King was a preacher of the Christian gospel, he knew this prophetic language down to his bones. Like any good sermon, IHAD blends the two kinds kinds of prophetic language together, alternating between the past…

And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal."

… and the future:

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

That last sentence is the most misused, misappropriated text in the United States since at least 1980. How and why did that happen?

Redemption and Revolution

The ideology of racism and the brutality of enslavement and its aftermath are obviously woven through the entire history of the United States going back to the colonial era. Racial oppression has always been an essential part of the American economy. MLK wasn’t naive about this history. Despite the liberation rhetoric in the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution, he knew there was no true promise of universal equality and justice intended there. So MLK is careful to make his inward and outward prophecies inseparable: no revolution without redemption, no redemption without revolution. “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up [revolution] and live out the true meaning of its creed [redemption]: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal” [transforming the meaning of the original language].

The work of the US civil rights movement has always been both redemptive and revolutionary. Trying to redeem American democracy through equal access to the ballot, for example; trying to revolutionize American society through equity in the streets, public spaces, trains and buses, hospitals, shop floors, boardrooms, everywhere. Revolutionary because it would mean justly reclaiming everything withheld by the enforcers of our old national ideology: housing, wages, education, health care, freedom of movement, safety from violence by the state and its permitted vigilantes. In other words, a revolution in wealth.

Neither Redemption Nor Revolution

Wealth has always equated to power in American society, so to equalize American wealth the ruling class would have to relinquish their absolute control over the existing political economy. A just share of wealth, and thus power, would be an unassailable birthright of the people. Can you imagine living in such a moral society? (It’s not hard to understand many conservatives since the 1950s thought MLK was obviously a communist.) American wealth and power is more concentrated in an untouchable group of White aristocrats and their families than it has ever been. Republicans are shrinking access to the ballot. Our horizon of possibility is chased into remoteness. And one of the great paradoxes of US politics since 1968 is how MLK’s words played a role in bringing this about.

IHAD was shorn of its redemptive, revolutionary demands by White aristocrats, their politicians, and their followers in the US of the 1980s. Their mission was to reframe MLK’s rhetoric so it appeared to support White supremacy instead of attacking it. They disregarded the historical context of three hundred years of injustice and microscopically focused on the phrase “…not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” This is what it looks like, from an address by Ronald Reagan in January 1986, where he was defending himself against critics pointing out that his administration had tried to roll back civil rights laws, poverty relief, and affirmative action :

We are committed to a society in which all men and women have equal opportunities to succeed, and so we oppose the use of quotas. We want a color-blind society.

And again, from February 1986:

We want what I think Martin Luther King asked for: We want a colorblind society. The ideal will be when we have achieved the moment when no one--or when nothing is done to or for anyone because of race, differences, or religion, or ethnic origin; and it's done not because of those things, but in spite of them.

In 1991, Senator Alan Simpson said this during the US Senate hearings on the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court:

[MLK was the] greatest . . . civil rights leader. . . [who] asked only that he and his children be judged, quote, 'based on the content of their character and not on the color of their skin,' unquote. Isn't what he was asking for was [sic] a colorblind judgment, and isn't that exactly what Judge Thomas is advocating?

There are too many examples to quote them all.

None of this is news to anyone who is familiar with the history of US civil rights since 1970. But it’s worth repeating just to point out how insidious it is that colorblindness became the mainstream interpretation of IHAD for generations of White Americans.

Equivocation and Counterrevolution

Because of MLK’s status as an unimpeachable martyr for civil rights, one whom baby boomers and their parents felt bound to respect, the “colorblind” framing of IHAD obtained moral weight in the White imagination and was passed on as the correct reading. Conveniently for the status quo, colorblindness assured the favored that their elevated status was not the symptom of a morally sick society. According to colorblindness, racism was not a hateful ideology incarnated by violence, injustice, poverty, and exploitation; it was simply bigotry. Pointing out the historical context of three hundred years — that was the real racism.

To complete the rhetorical reversal, in the 1980s-1990s American politicians shifted their language away from addressing racial inequality in society in order to talk about crime. Talking about the “race problem” went out, talking about the “crime rate” and “superpredators” came in. The terminology of crime, safety and property rights allowed Americans to embrace racist sentiments without overtly using racist words. By this logic tough-on-crime rhetoric and mass incarceration were not ideological projects designed to ruin the lives of thousands of Black Americans, they were initiatives intended to make the entire nation “safer.”

The phrase Black Lives Matter came into common usage after the murder of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman in 2012. Echoing MLK it declares the value of the lives of Black Americans against the constant threat of violence and oppression. The conservative backlash to this righteous declaration was the phrase “All Lives Matter,” descended from colorblind rhetoric. It weaponizes the abstract concept of equality in order to neutralize any shift towards justice in our material reality. The ultimate mutation is the perverse phrase “Blue Lives Matter,” an advertisement of American police’s aggressive opposition to anything that might restrain their capability to terrorize not just Black Lives but All Lives.

The Giant Triplets

By the time of his 1967 speech “Beyond Vietnam,” MLK had shifted his prophecy towards the outward, revolutionary posture:

I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin... we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

Racism, materialism, and militarism are the pillars of American dominance and hegemony across the planet. To attack them is to undermine everything that keeps America “strong”. Acting against them is taboo. That’s why true activism provokes an extreme reaction by the ruling class and their media and military wings. Activism stakes out a place of power, refuses to relinquish it, and uses that power on behalf of the people against injustice.

I Hope This Well Finds Us

In IHAD, Dr. King says: “we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.” The roots of the world “well” and “wish”, abundance and satisfaction, are also connected to the word “will”. Is abundance and satisfaction, in the form of justice in our society, something we can both wish for and will into reality? Is there such a generous well somewhere waiting to bring us abundance and satisfaction? Maybe we will find it and draw from it every day. I hope this well finds us.

Archives and Empathy

1857 bill of sale for 13 female slaves from New Orleans, purchased by cotton magnate Benjamin Roach for $16,000.  © The Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin, 2006-2026.

(Just a heads up: this gets into some dark territory.)

I know that I haven't written anything on this blog in over year.  I also know that what I'm going to talk about here -- namely, the Stanford Rape Case -- might not seem related to archives at first.  But I hope you bear with me here.

A couple days ago, I started to reading the woman's victim statement, and found I couldn't stop reading, even as it got more and more painful.  Reading it all the way through felt like a necessary act of bearing witness, and apparently numerous others felt the same way.  I couldn't get this awful crime out of my head (and learning of the rapist's light sentence and his oblivious father and friends made it worse), but there was something about it that particularly ate away at me, apart from the obvious horror of his actions and subsequent denial of any guilt on his part.

Finally I realized what was haunting me about this case: someone very close to me was attacked in a similar way many years ago.  She too was sexually assaulted after passing out at a party.  But she never pressed charges or publicly accused her attacker.  I firmly believe that he hasn't lost a moment of sleep since, or even spent a single moment of thought considering his actions that night.  I wouldn't be surprised if he's completely forgotten about it; if he was reminded, I can only imagine the numerous denials and excuses he would make for his behavior.  Like almost all rapists he'll never suffer any consequences at all for the violence he committed.  Consequences are for victims and those that love them. 

Committing an act of violence against another person is like a man dropping a rock into a still pond; the ripples spread out, strong at first, weaker over time, but taking a long while to fully disappear.  And now there's a constant rhythm of stones dropping into water, and the ripples criss-cross each other, and overlap, and the surface is never still, almost boiling, and that's the world we're born to and the one we've made. 

But beyond the fear and rage they inspire in us, there's something ... uninteresting about those men with their stones, something banal and repetitive about men who are truly hateful.  Whatever social, religious, and/or political wrapping they choose, the rancid contents are the same as they've ever been: greed, jealousy, rage, and the old-as-humanity-itself pure tribal fear of the outsider and the stranger.  That tribalism is why Brock Turner's family and friends, who I'm sure are otherwise decent human beings, will defend him.  It's a failure of empathy.  Their circle of compassion is only as wide as their tribe, at least in this case, and why they think he should not only not be punished but not suffer any consequences at all.  Consequences are for victims and those that love them. 

What really matters -- in the big, big picture -- isn't hateful individuals, but hateful institutions, which project that tribal fear and loathing through space and time.  Individual racists, for all the violence they may commit, don't matter; racist institutions cause mass suffering and can tear whole societies apart.  Brock Turner as an individual doesn't really matter, he's just one more hateful man in a literally endless succession of them.  But Turner's defenders, apologists, and enablers are different, because their tribalism is tangled up with the institutions of family and the legal system.  Just like individuals and their tribes, institutions have their own ways of justifying the limits of their empathy.  Usually, they claim that they had to act in a particular way because of some responsibility to an even greater force: corporations are beholden to their stockholders and investors; political parties are to their donors and primary voters; universities to their trustees and alumni; governments are to "national security" and "jobs".  And institutions will retroactively justify their actions, as well as their continued existence, using the discourse of history.  Tradition, Heritage, Honor, Memory, Etc.

The reason I created this blog, as I suggested in my first post, is to uncover ways archives can complicate and subvert those very "historical" narratives to which institutions so dearly cling.  But the most lively conversation/argument taking place in the archives field over the past ten years (outside of What To Do About Interns/Volunteers/Paraprofessionals) has been around ethics and archives.  What does it mean to be an ethical archivist when one is split three ways between professional standards, personal beliefs, and duties to one's job and colleagues?  And when many of the records we administer were themselves created and/or acquired unethically?  More recent discussions have focused on how archivists can best use their work to forward the realization of social justice in their communities, locally and nationally.

Is that what archivists are for?  What are archivists for?  Obviously the answer is "many, many things," but if one of those things is "increasing social justice," then the follow-up question is "how would archivists do that?"  I submit that one answer is already embedded in the material we work with every day.  Many of the records that arrange, describe and preserve tell the stories of individual human beings; apart from personal papers, even organizational records -- which make up the bulk of the records in US archives -- have individual histories embedded in them if you know where to look.  We can recover those histories if we try.  Attempting an authentic recovery of those histories -- comprehending those individuals on their own terms, not ours or some institution's -- means using our imagination, our will, our knowledge, and also our empathy.  And I believe that process, that movement of the mind through space and time, can itself increase not just the knowledge but also the empathy of those who undertake it.

This might sound naive to you, or just wrong.  But you've probably seen something like this yourself.  Have you seen someone become fascinated by one of your records?  There's a kind of invisible connection made between a person and a document, a book, an artwork, an object from the past that he or she suddenly feels connected to.  I've felt it myself and seen it happen to others.  Sometimes folks will approach historical artifacts with a particular arrogance, ready to either fit things into preconceived notions of what "really happened" or ignore them altogether; those folks, usually older, are lost causes.  But then that true connection happens it's real, and it can be meaningful to the person making it. 

And maybe that's a first step down a path of broader horizons and new understandings for that person.  I want to facilitate that experience if I can, I want them to feel it for themselves rather than explain it to them secondhand.  I want that person to look at the names of women sold as slaves in this country and think, "who were those women?  What where their lives like?  Why was this happening to them?  How could supposedly good people treat other human beings this way?"  So often the reaction to any discussion of slavery is denial and evasion; "it wasn't really that bad..." "they could have just run away..." "poor whites had it just as bad..." "the Irish were the real slaves..." "it doesn't have any bearing on our lives now..." and so on.  But if I can get someone to push through that disgusting layer of ignorance, cynicism, and stupidity, to want to reach out mentally and emotionally, to want to ask the hard questions that follow, to have more empathy, I've done something worth doing. 

Like most people I like to believe that my work does something, however small, to improve things; I think this might be one way archives and archivists do that.  I don't believe that I make "the world" a better place -- the world is now and always has been a terrible place, full of violence and suffering, and it will always be that way, no matter what I or anyone else does.  But within that large world of the present, we have microcosms that have captured the past, small worlds that can be fully entered and understood only with an open mind and an open heart.  We beckon others to come in, to open their minds and hearts as well.  It's something.  Isn't it?

Archives as a Subversive Art; or, Start as you Mean to Go On

(c) Paramount Pictures, 1981.

Greetings and welcome to Imaginary Histories!  I'm glad you're here.  This is a blog mainly about archives and archival matters.  To many of you reading, that probably sounds like a narrow, dull parameter for a blog, but believe me (and archivists already know this) -- archives are plugged into so many cultural, technological, legal, and ethical issues it's hard to know what not to talk about.  That the archives field exists within such a permeable membrane is one of the things I love about it.  I suspect that you, also, whoever you are, love the intersectional character of archives, even though it complicates our professional identity.  Being an archivist means constantly having to re-explain what archives are -- to those outside the field, those within it, even to oneself... but that's what makes it fun.

I'm going to be honest with you: I've never blogged before.  Starting a blog is a bold move -- in 1999; now it's like throwing a bucket of water into the sea, hoping that someone not only manages to swim through your personal H2O but also has some opinion on it that they wish to share.  So why do it?  Mainly: I'm teaching the Introduction to Archival Methods and Services class again next semester at the Simmons College School of Library and Information Science, and I want to integrate this blog into my class; I wasn't seeing other archival writings online (blogs, tweets, presentations, papers, etc.) addressing some things that I wanted to talk about; I turned 40 years old this year, and mortality is -- no surprise, I guess -- an excellent motivator.

This post isn't going to be as long as other posts to come, but I'm at least going to introduce some of the themes that will run through this blog.  I'm particularly fascinated by the complex relationship between archival records -- and archives as institutions -- with "memory," understood as historical narratives broadly accepted as fact/history within a specific society and culture.  Archival records are often used by those in power to reinforce the selected, "preferred" historical narratives.  But the actual meaning of any given archival record is "underdetermined," i.e. open to various interpretations and ripe for placement in various contexts and frameworks of meaning (the archive itself is one such context).  I suggest to you that archival records tend to radically undermine consistent historical narratives, and indeed that is part of what give the records "enduring value."  Hence the title of this post (with apologies to the late Amos Vogel), "Archives as a Subversive Art" -- archives as nests of slippery objects that manage to wriggle out from under all attempts to completely capture their meaning.

But if that's true, it presents a paradox.  Most archival records are institutional records, created to reflect the activities of an organization and its members, retained in order to retain some degree of corporate memory.  How could they be subversive of anything?  Well, that's part of what the blog is going to be about.  There are many other paradoxes embedded in archival theory and practice, and I want to tease out as many as possible.  Part of that teasing is going to be scrutinizing the content of archival/historical "meaning" (as used above) and its relation to what becomes "fact" and "history."

But in addition to all the above, I plan on discussing a lot of practical problems and solutions grounded in actual archival work, including issues around archival software, digitization, web design, processing, preservation, donor agreements, and so on.  I definitely won't just talk about theory.  On the other hand, I will talk about theory sometimes, so you've been warned.

About the Timeline of Archival History on this site: I couldn't find anything like it online, so I figured I would make it myself.  Right now it's going to be a work in progress for as long as I can imagine, so please feel free to suggest additions.  My goal is to build it into something useful for students and non-archivists who want to get a useful outline of the major events, trends, and individuals in the field.  

Finally -- and in advance -- have a good Hanukkah, Christmas, Solstice, Saturnalia, Kwanzaa, and any other holiday to celebrate the fact that we made it through yet another year (more or less).  Nice work!  Let's try to do it again next year...

P.S.  I have a weird thing for song titles (and titles in general) so I plan to use them in the titles of my blog posts, unless that gets too annoying.  But I'll link to the song referred to in each post.  Here's the first one.  Sorry for the creepy image.  Happy holidays... and pleasant dreams.