25 - Archival Materials: Essayism as a Process of Witness, Care and Reckoning

Summary

Archives are about being saved.

— Ashley R. Maynor

Over the pandemic days of 2020, I took to doing jigsaw puzzles for the first time in my life. In the early spring of our year-long confinement, my son and I put together a surprisingly difficult image of colorful popsicles and ice creams that was all swirls and mottles. After finishing our first challenge, we next chose a lake scene. Mostly sky and water, that one was hard too. The last puzzle I finished was a thousand-piece iteration, an image of four rows of eight painted wooden doors. Each night, I sat and worked until my hips hurt and my husband told me it was time to go to bed. I found it strangely difficult to tear myself away. By then, my son had lost interest, so I worked alone, putting together a whole, fragment by fragment.

I am a lover of archives. Not only the figurative ‘archive’ (singular), that, as the late, great Canadian archivist Terry Cook put it, ‘is usually engaged … as a metaphoric symbol, as representation of identity, or as the recorded memory production of some person or group or culture’ but also ‘archives’ (plural), that is, the ‘history of documents over time’. I see now that my work in the archives resembles that pandemic puzzling. I am drawn to one for the same reasons as I was drawn to the other. Both tasks are methodical: out of the disorder of uncatalogued boxes of letters and cartons of odd-shaped pieces comes order. Puzzles and archives share this: both exist as collections of fragments that, if put together correctly, can be made whole.

But order is only the first step. Work in the archives (plural) may provide a chance to systematize events or facts, but to achieve meaning, a researcher must look up and beyond the pile of dusty papers before her. She needs to step out of the world of records and into the one of ideas, that is, into the archive (singular). It is this oscillation between the ‘small’ (the documentary, historical, fragmentary archives) and the ‘big’ (the metaphorical, philosophical, environmental, global archive) that defines a particular method of essaying that values both the archives and the archive equally.