archival nightmares + that's pretty much it

 Babes and bots, 

Ever wondered about the obscurities of common words? Here I was, sitting in a magical workshop while new classmates shared their genius ideas, not listening to their genius ideas because I was too focused on the first word: archivist. 

And what if I re-wrote the definition like this: 

a person who maintains

    and is in 

[charge of] archives 

Idiotic? Lame? Misleading? You tell me. Maintains = charge? So I started thinking about the possibilities here: one's identity as an archivist, one's role as an archivist, and one's passion as an archivist. Are they different, the same, or overlapping? Probably all three, and none of the above. I suppose what I wanted to think specifically about were the origins of an archivist & The Archive. 

When I was in college I took an Art History course in which The Archive was in our everyday lexicon. To my understanding at this current moment, The Archive is a powerful and empowered set of cultural property in any genre or form, often assessed, and therefore certified, in academic settings by scholars. Then again, to a group of over 20 highly trained professionals, The Archive is a non-descript radical housing cooperative. And to the world of Google, The Archive is quite literally an online archive where I have, time and again, found personal genealogical documents and open access to books/movies/videos for school. And then for others, The Archive is a cool note-taking app. 

We are constantly living inside of The Archive just as we are growing beyond it. There are few moments in time that strike me more splendidly than realizing the passage of time puts us on the precipice of history & present at every moment. Someone in my workshop said that and I wish I knew who. 

I've always wondered why museums aren't called archives, what the delineation between these structures is, and what minute, tenacious distance falls between these separate words. How might the gravity of that difference best be displayed or described? 

I suppose we are living through an archival/museum experience now: a pandemic. While looking through The Paris Review's blog archives, I came across "Fuck the Bread. The Bread Is Over." by Sabrina Orah Mark. I'm sure if I wanted, I could find a lot more. But searching for materials seems to be only one aspect of The Archive I am imagining. 

While sitting in my creative writing workshop listening to my peers' genius, I reminisced on my own archive. I do this often, call it daydreaming. But it wasn't fabricated exactly, it was a memory. And while I could argue to the moon that memories and dreams are not so far apart, I could also write them down, preserve them, call it an archive of stark, traditional value, date them, stamp them, file them in a small drawer in a tall cabinet (call it a memory bank?). Or I could let them wander my body and change. Could that, too, be an archive? 

Well, that's all for today, folks. Thanks for taking a bite out of the sandwich with me. 

xoxo BLT

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