Forgive me Father, for I have sinned. It’s been . . . a long time since my last blog.
My motivation has been waning of late. Midsummer doldrums I suppose. In an effort to make our house more habitable for yet more guests coming in the next two months Scott and I have attacked our basement. As in many other houses, our basement has sort of become a dumping ground for items we can’t find places for in the rest of the house. This includes sporting equipment, the ancient computer we never use, our TV, pull-out couch, and boxes I haven’t opened since we left Colorado four years ago. You all know the kind of boxes I’m talking about. The boxes that are usually at your parents house that you’ve conveniently forgotten exist. Well, since my parents are nomads, more or less, I’ve been in possession of these boxes of childhood relics for some time. Ironically, I also have things that belong to my parents that I attempted to rescue from either the garbage or the pawn shop.
These infamous boxes were placed in our living room last week for me to go through. I would say like six boxes in all. One box contained the remnants of items I always kept in my nightstand. Another has been labelled for years as “Paper Memories.” Another named “Random Office.” The final three contained dolls, bears, music boxes and stuff from my bedroom when I was in high school. I began with the boxes containing paper stuff thinking this would be the quickest way through the material because I could just chuck everything. I was so wrong. As I began going through these things, stuff like greeting cards, diaries, old calendars, odd feelings washed over me. For example, I would suddenly have memories of kids I’d worked with when I was a preschool teacher as I found cards from them and their parents. Talk about affect. Many of these items and the memories they contained would hit me in the chest with unexpected potency as I browsed the words contained within them. I found cards from my sister from years ago where her handwriting was scrawled in the unmistakeable script of a five year-old. There were pictures of babies who I’d watched grow into kindergarteners while I worked at the daycare. Letter after letter from my grandma who never failed to write to me no matter where I was.
I started to feel myself in a dilemma. What do you do with these memories? This history? I could feel them weighing heavily in my chest. Seeing as how I’m re-reading all the Harry Potter books right now I couldn’t help but wish I had a pensieve. In the books several of the characters have a large stone bowl with runes on the side in which they store their memories. Dumbledore talks about how they are useful when one’s memories become too heavy for one mind to carry at which point you simply pull them out and place them in the pensieve where you can choose to look or not look at them at your leisure. Going through these boxes was like spending two days in my pensieve.
As I’m an organizer I purchased plastic bins to put everything in since sometimes our basement gets damp and the cardboard boxes weren’t cutting it anymore. As the piles of things began to accumulate in our living room, I split things into random categories assuming I would end up adding categories as I moved through. So, I started with a grandma bin, a friends and family bin, a personal keepsake bin, an Oxford bin, a Kennolyn camp bin, a Kindercare bin, and a wedding bin. However, as I moved through the material the categories remained. Everything I kept seemed to fit in one of these bins already. The only category I added was high school stuff. It’s funny how I unconsciously managed to keep relics that marked the biggest moments of transition in my life. How the hell do you know at the time that something is an important event? Obviously, my wedding and high school, but I took trips to lots of places in my life and various countries, but it was my trip to Oxford and my summer as a counselor in Santa Cruz that my memory self chose to preserve in these archives.
Then I moved on to what I thought would be the harder task going through my old dolls and such. Two hours and three boxes later I was finished. I have a huge box of things I’m ready to get rid off and a bin half the size of the one that has all the paper stuff full of the few dolls I want to keep including my entire Madame Alexander collection because my mom is determined that I keep them for a possible daughter. But it was all the stuff with words I couldn’t bring myself to chuck. Crayon colored drawings from children whose names I’d forgotten, letters on flower decorated paper from my grandma talking about the weather and her flowers, letters from girls in my cabin at camp, the construction paper book Karen made for my bridal shower that chronicled the adventures of that party, ticket stubs from London shows, congratulations cards when I got my master’s degree. And diaries. Thoughts written about my trip to the theatre department at Berkeley. My first solo cross-country trip and the absolute fear I battled with in the wide open prarie across Wyoming as my car made strange noises and I realized if it broke down I’d have to deal with the situation alone. The elation once I’d pushed through the fear and watched the sunset across the Salt Lake desert.
Coupling all this intense emotional crap with the research I’ve been working on sent me into a brain seize. Really, even though it’s in the library, I’m always delving into someone’s personal archive, their pensieve. And really, my material memories function in the same way as the stuff I’m pulling out of the library. I created my own archive using the same techiniques of inclusion and exclusion that I’m critiquing in my research. The stuff didn’t magically fit into the categories I made. I decided on the categories ahead of time and so the items were already biased towards one of these categories. The items that didn’t fit easily into these categories were either thrown out (because their emotional pull on me wasn’t significant enough) or crammed into other categories where I rationalized their place within a totally different context. I don’t say these things in order to critically distance myself from my personal feelings (a response to my mom’s voice in my head telling me I don’t have to analyze everything), but because the choice to refrain from analysis in order to preserve some pure experiential emotional truth is really dangerous. Just as the choice to distance oneself completely from your research and ignore the emotion, the fact that you’re delving into someone else’s diaries, recollections, and personal moments is dangerous as well. Without this knowledge, the use of analysis but also care there can be no ethical mode of researching your own or someone else’s personal archive.
……..and I’m trying to work up the gumption to really get to work on my paper. Thank you for your time:)
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