(1)
The commencement and the commandment.
The body is never stagnant.
The beginning and the rule.
The body is never singular.
The archive as a place. A truth. A law.
The body is never just a body.
(2)
The crisis of the archive is the crisis of the body. We compromise our biology for our behaviors. In our careful negotiations, we have overlooked a collaboration with the wild. The unruly.
Life in a body, if nothing else, finds death. The stories that fall in between orbit around their own stories of life and death. And yet every cell of my body imagines eternity. I bind onto the elements in an attempt to bind onto timelessness.
If I’m not perpetually in fear of my own physical death, I am at all times cleaving to my memories, coaxing those memories to be an answer. The answer. The archive, the vessel, the material - that which contains the fear of forgetting. The archive imagines eternity. It longs to remain.
How do we collaborate with the wild? How do we become celebrants of the unruly?
(3)
Unearthing an archive is haptic no matter the sensorial experience. Even the lifeless scroll through digital archives can bring me to utter stillness and pierce through my ribcage. Like walking through a cemetery whose bodies beneath I know nothing about but feel a deep longing for. There is a palpable connection between archiving and life - and between the archived and the dead.
(4)
I have been taught to take solace in systemic life. A system on either side of my skin. A story inside and outside my body. I can speak in systems as if it is my mother tongue. I can move in systems as if it were my choreography.
Who creates these systems? These stories? It’s as if they, too, speak my mother tongue.
(5)
silence
A paperweight for silence.
The crisis of the body lies in the paradox of learned systems and boundaries. Our bodies and their traces are not on either side of a threshold. Like how we have learned that we are beautiful until we have aged. Or we are careless until we are ill.
A threshold of materiality, a threshold of place, a threshold of time. These are not inherent to being a body.
What is revealed in place of these thresholds? The supple body? The story inside the story? A multitude of truths?
I wonder if abstraction is actually when matter is so precise that we have no escape. That is the reality that feels the most noxious.
(6)
You probably won’t be a fossil.
Death: Life’s Greatest Mystery: an interactive exhibition at the field museum in Chicago.
As I entered, I was struck at the precision. The contemplated mapping of the subject. The organized grouping of questions surrounding the material.
One of the first labels read, “You probably won’t be a fossil”, then proceeded to teach me about the decomposition of my flesh and bone. It would only be in an extreme situation that the earth would preserve my tissue. I probably won’t be a fossil. What will I probably be?
To remember soil as an archive of all life is to remember the archive as vibrations. It is not arrested time but the locus of enunciation. In other words, a porous place of communication.
How are we listening?