Library Allsorts
A brief layered reimagining of the library as a living, shifting archive carried through bodies, landscapes, and time.
Before electric clouds, before buildings, before stone, and vellum, and dye, and ink, knowledge lived in people. Griot. Scop. Bard. Shanachie, as we say. Custodians of clan histories, and, later, keepers of Ireland’s storied soul. Libraries, before the word lost its breath. That’s where it begins. In the shush between words, the flick of a wrist, the flare of an eyebrow, not catalogued, but carried, remembered in the marrow. Embodied archives. Shamans. Cunning folk. Elders, like my mother’s mother’s sister, who pure delighted in uncloseting family secrets: just-so stories of how [redacted]. Wise women who knew the exact rhythm of a birthing chant, the tang of a good tincture – who carried “the knowledge,” enough to heal bodies and broken spirits alike. (Imagined witches, then torched – like forbidden books in great, sizzling pyres; crackling and spitting fire across expanding empires, as worldmaking men cradled fresh myths born from the ashes of the old. The killing of flesh-bound wisdom. Veneficicide = libricide.) Red tents. Sweat lodges. Sparta’s warrior-making agōgē. A great mass of learning or knowledge, gathered, stored, and intimately shared – cf. “library,” as defined. AO3. Pubs. Clubs. Community hubs. Wakes & other family get togethers, everyone spinning yarns. Moments that leave you changed, or just a little more tucked into the fabric of where you’re from. A stutterer’s pause. Names – the all-before-me-Ellens. I’m gonna marry a library-keeper and keep her company. Photograph albums. Tins of recipes and, later, their makings. Illustrated bodies. Holdings of gathered things & loose ends – cards, keys, stubs, broken-up bijouterie, and other not-quite-nothings. Strange coins, for reasons lost. A private archive of what once mattered most, most, most in all the world. Envelopes of faded flower heads. Shells. Words. Little messes of love-lore, or perhaps better, marginalia. The objects of a person’s study, the sources upon which they depend for instruction – cf. “library,” as defined. Towns. One called Library, Pennsylvania. Maps. Nazca Lines. A dune, or some other sandy place – beach, strand, our loughshore. Grains. Bones. Teeth. A fragmented archive of catastrophe. Every wind-riven surge. Every breath. Every falling tear. And the cosmic tempests – dust from dying stars. Disorder. Drift. The unsettled memory of matter. Uluru & other dreamtime places. The Burren’s “Great Stalactite” – a single, sustained note the earth has been composing for over 70,000 years, dripping 23.9 feet into the hush of Doolin Cave. A heavy archive of mineral sound, equal, perhaps, in weight to Yawning Man’s decades-long desert-born sonic outpouring, solidifying into official record since 2005. Discographies, of sorts: one organic, one electric. A catalogue, list – cf. “library,” as defined. A way to record. To remember. Not forget. Lose ourselves. Dream. Delay. Cast away. Santa letters. Rental listings. Bucket lists. Pros and cons, scribbled on the inside of a jotter cover, curled like roaches. To stay or go. To be or not. “This above all: to thine own self be true” – last item on Polonius’s parting list. Birdsong. Dancing bees. A flame. A flower, quiet archivist of sunlit secrets, holding history in its tiny burnt-butter eye. What if, instead of plucking and admiring, we could listen to its stories. So too the trees – the old ones, the now-lost ones. Gog and Magog. Sycamore Gap. Wicklow’s Blue Maple & friends. And the vines. Ayahuasca, “spirit rope,” like the mushroom, threshold beings, gatekeepers of other ways of knowing and being. A mycelial network trading nutrients, warnings, and memory: the “Wood Wide Web.” Libraries made of root and spore. Sparking wonder. Curiosity. Connection – cf. “library,” as defined: from PIE root leub(h)- comes liber – bark turned book, and beneath that, leubh- – to care for, to desire, to love. An archive not built, but green-grown. Not filed, but alive. And we’re back to living libraries. Denmark’s Human Library, where you borrow people instead of books, each one inviting you to “Unjudge Someone.” Bradbury’s “book people.” Mylo. Anthologist of alt-music. Gotham’s Oracle. Iron Man’s J.A.R.V.I.S., then came F.R.I.D.A.Y., breaking the echo. Star Trek’s Data, the sweet face of AI. Now we’re getting into it. HAL 9000. MU/TH/UR 6000. Cold. Calculating. Ruthlessly obedient to corporate directives. No wonder AI gives us the creeps. But out there in space, look back – and there it is. Sagan’s pale blue dot. Earth itself. Not just home. Not just lifeboat. A great library. Fragile. Shared. Still ours.
If you’d like to follow where this work is headed, I’m a former library worker now deep into a new book exploring the radical promise of the modern public library. I’ll be sharing more soon, including next month’s essay on the contested future of libraries, so please do subscribe if you want to stay close to the unfolding conversation.
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