Such efforts — when people work for justice or simply to improve the lives of other people, and try to ensure the voiceless are heard and the marginalised are pulled into the centre, but get nowhere, for a very long time — are not failure but examples of striving without instant reward. And there is a dignity to this. Sometimes it’s enough to have honestly tried — because if we don’t try, nothing will ever happen. Walls don’t fall at the blast of a single trumpet, and nor do tyrants, but only after a long, slow symphony that only becomes audible when it reaches a crescendo.
WHICH BRINGS ME BACK to archives. Why do we even preserve archives — the stuffed boxes in our attics that tell our own stories, as well as those in distinguished libraries that preserve the documents of influential figures? And where is the line between hoarding and preservation?
What it is crucial to understand is that to keep records is to insist on significance: by doing so, you place something on record, and assert that it is of note. You are saying that it is something people should remember, that they may want to find out about at some point. If it is marked down, they will be able to do that.
Women have not historically kept records. They have quilted and stitched. They have scrapbooked, pasted in remnants, sewn fables, passed stories down through generations, while men have filed official documents. And through these documents, men have dictated the past and determined who we see as winners and losers. This is how power begets power. As Joan M. Schwartz, archival specialist professor of art history at Queen’s University Canada, wrote:
Through archives, the past is controlled. Certain stories are privileged and others marginalized. And archivists are an integral part of this story-telling. In the design of record-keeping systems, in the appraisal and selection of a tiny fragment of all possible records to enter the archive, in approaches to subsequent and ever-changing description and preservation of the archive, and in its patterns of communication and use, archivists continually reshape, reinterpret, and reinvent the archive. This represents enormous power over memory and identity, over the fundamental ways in which society seeks evidence of what its core values are and have been, where it has come from, and where it is going. Archives, then, are not passive storehouses of old stuff, but active sites where social power is negotiated, contested, confirmed.
Historically, archives have excluded the stories of women, of people of colour, of the LGBTQI communities, of those inhabiting peripheries. The records of their lives have been discarded or lost, while those of small groups of powerful men have been carefully polished, even the smallest fragments collected and kept. Now the rest of us need to insist our stories matter. Today, thanks to social media, we can, but we must also keep records of these stories. And not just the stories of triumph, victory or visibility, but of the liminal moments of our lives, and of the long, grinding nature of reform, the bitter, often boring struggle for freedom.
Slash, destroy, pin on a pretty brooch, fade to static.
For me the piles of documents and memoranda in an activist’s attic are stories of perseverance. So if you have leaned your weight against something disturbing or unjust and it apparently remained unchanged, remember this: weight is cumulative. Rebecca Solnit is correct when she argues that ‘every protest shifts the world’s balance’ and urges us to remember the ‘countless acts of resistance on all scales that were never recorded’. To reinforce this idea, she employs the metaphor of the mushroom: ‘The mushrooms that spring up after rain are only the fruiting body of a far larger underground fungus we do not see; the rain causes the mushrooms to rise out of the earth, but the fungus was alive and well (and invisible) beforehand; the rain can be an event.’
If we are to tell our stories well, we mustn’t limit them to tales of triumph, as though liberation, progress or success is simply inevitable and inexorable and only requires time — that’s a bit like posting only pretty, filtered shots on Instagram. The truth is that progress has always been defined, fuelled and foiled by mess and mistakes as well as might. When you think of your own bursts of activism, or volunteering, or your efforts to just change something you cared about, honour the fact that you tried, whether it was to do with human rights, pipelines, corruption, water, fraud or freedom.
This is why we should tell the stories — and value the experiences — of setbacks as well as those of incrementalism and movements, talk not just of grenades, shock troops, infantry, masterminds and strategists but also of stretcher-bearers, bandage makers and the injured, scarred, deserted and deeply flawed. The battlefield is vast, and even when the major conflicts have cooled and subsided from public view, someone is always fighting or striving on some patch, somewhere, sending up flares that are very rarely seen. Once they draw the eye, though, they are difficult to ignore.
Chapter 7
Honour the Temporary
ephemera
noun 1. something transitory or short-lived
2. (functioning as a plural) a class of collectable items not originally intended to last for more than a short time, such as tickets, posters, postcards, or labels
HISTORY C16: from Greek ephemeros lasting only a day, from hemera day
MY SON HAS ZERO interest in clothes. His dream would be to never have to spend a moment thinking about what to wear, to own garments that would serve for both school and bed. Sometimes he even throws pyjamas on top of his school uniform to try to trick me, and to ensure getting dressed in the morning will be a simple, streamlined process. Yet he has somehow amassed a large crate of underpants. I pulled them out recently and pointed out that since he was now ten, we could probably get rid of those sized three and four. He gave me a stern look and said, ‘But Mum! Think of all the memories in these underpants!’
I held up one faded pair, with a Pokemon on it. ‘Oh yeah? What’s the memory with this one?’
‘We went to the waterslides that time and it was so great.’
‘Yeah, it really was actually,’ chimed in his sister.
Underpant memories.
But he is right. Objects are memories. What if Marie Kondo’s idea about tossing out all objects that don’t give us joy makes a crucial omission: that objects have intrinsic value as triggers of memory and nostalgia, and therefore help us document our lives?
And if that’s true, which morsels matter, how do we curate the objects in our lives? If I were to hold a museum exhibition called, say, ‘A Little-known Baird: The Early Years’, which things would I place behind glass? What would you include in your exhibition? And is this another reason we collect stuff? Because colour leaches, memories fade, because the sepia of nostalgia stains mental frames?
Yet why does any of this even matter to us? Perhaps we should stop snapping and gathering, framing and filtering and posting, and learn to accept that there is beauty and depth in temporariness.
ONE EXAMPLE OF TEMPORARY beauty is the mayfly, the insect with the shortest lifespan on Earth, at just twenty-four hours. (In fact, the adult female of one mayfly species, Dolania americana, rarely lives as long as five minutes.) As young nymphs, they can live in the water for several years. But once they become adults, they only have one purpose — to reproduce. They don’t eat and their bellies are filled with air as they float to the water’s surface and prepare to fly. Quite understandably, they quickly congregate in groups and dance on every surface they can find. Most have just a day or two to dance or to fly.