Written in response to Ruth Beale’s current practice, this text is an extension of a text commissioned by the South London Gallery for the Conch critical discussion forum 19/09/11.

Available to download here> RebeccaBligh_Conch_TheMatterInHand

 

En arkhē ēn ho Lógos

“In the beginning was the Word”; or— since the Greek word, arkhē, conveys at once beginning and commandment[1]—“In the commandment was the Word”—and the word was Be! as in Begin![2], the original commandment, en arkhē,  of Judeo-Christian Creation; which, en arkhē, says Giorgio Agamben, ‘never ceases beginning; that is to say, never ceases to govern and command what it has initiated.’302

So begins the Bible (from Greek biblion,  “book”,  a diminutive of biblos: “papyrus, scroll”, of Semitic origin’[3]) and  humanity is called into Be!ing not long after. God models Adam as a first go, only doesn’t quite set enough aside for Eve, so that even after pinching a bit of clay off of Adam, Eve still ends up a bit smaller and has pretty much been pushed around by Adam ever since. Not exactly an auspicious start then; and sure enough, just as the first pancake so often ends up in the bin, what with all those kundalini high-jinks in the Garden of Eden and whatnot—all highly symbolic—God has soon had enough. Still, determined to try try again, plucky old God opts for a good wash and brush up, namely, the Great Flood, which only falls short of a complete tabula rasa due to one Noah, his arial fairly tuned to the divine frequency, who duly sets about building what is to be called an ark—a big boat being the only sensible receptacle receptable for anything much, after all, in a time of Big Water—in which procreative pairs of creatures are installed, as lit. arkhē-typal iterations, in significatio passiva, of the original commandment that called them into Be!ing; a living archive (also from Greek arkhē[4]) that creation might Begin! again, according to God’s Word.

En arkhē ēn ho Lógos

A couple of prophets later, the Ten Commandments of Mosaic law are also said to have come to rest in vehicle of the same name, this time the “Ark of the Covenant”. This ark,  the archetypal namesake of every chest or cabinet in which the Torah (being also the first five books of what the Christians call the Old Testament) is kept in scroll form in every synagogue, this ark is called in Hebrew Aron ha-Ḳodesh, “Holy Ark”; of which the English word “ark” (via ‘Old English ærc, from Latin arca “chest”’[5]) is said to be an acronymic derivation.[6]

It is also curious how phonetically akin (albeit etymologically diverse) the Hebrew word kodesh, “holy”, appears, on the page, to the Latinate “codex” [7]; not more than a whisky or two, shurely, and a set of ill-fitting dentures between them.  While now mainly used in academic reference to manuscriptum,  handwritten copies of ancient and often important texts,[8]  “codex” technically also designates any book in the technological form we have come to take for granted, i.e., any number of pages, or “leaves”[9], bound together between “boards”.

Indeed, it seems only right and proper that, amidst the linguistic branches of those three monotheistic traditions referred to collectively in Islam (itself included) as those of the ahl-al-Kitab,  the “Peoples of the Book”;  a word for “Holy” and a word for “Book” should somehow coincide. The Classical, Greco-Roman element introduced with “codex” does little to dislodge this appellation; it is of course thanks in large part to Islamic copyists and commentators that much of the Classical tradition survived at all, to seed that ‘which – a little too mystically – we refer to as the Renaissance’.[10]

As such, it is perhaps not so surprising to find e.g., Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive project writing of ‘a negative visceral reaction’ to the fact that ‘two of the corporations involved in major book scanning [to digital archives] have sawed off the bindings of modern books to speed the digitizing process’.[11] Some might feel an equally visceral relief upon discovering that the Internet Archive project itself—begun precisely as a digital archive of evenly paced captures of the internet itself, or at least certain of its named “locations”[12]—is now also compiling a parallel archive of real, haptic[13] paper copies of those books they are also now digitising, to serve as ‘authoritative and safe cop[ies] that may be called upon in the future’.[14] And why not; after all, digital archives are being constructed which by their very hi-tec nature need electricity to be accessed, as we sail blithely toward peak oil. Do they know something we don’t?

To archive is per se an act of faith, an investment in a future, but which one?[15] You don’t have to go many clicks from, e.g., the Internet Archive project to find[16] that the Svalbard Seed Vault,[17] ark and archive, is the touchstone and analogy du jour for many actual and putative archival projects, both digital and “real”[18]; that in the event of the end of what is often termed “civilisation”[19], a general commencement of gnashing and wailing, etc[20], “we”—and, yes, despite, or perhaps because of a rapidly changing geo-polis,  it often seems a decidedly occidental “we”—might enact A Canticle for Leibowitz.[21] That the dead might speak to, and through, the living; that we might, Lif and Lifthrasir,[22] re-Begin!

The archival spectrum  runs from “dark” to “light”. Whereas the content of a light archive is designed to be accessed, according to its own variously ex-, or inclusive stipulations,  the emphatic purpose of a dark archive is preservation and storage; think like buried treasure, think time capsules, x marks the spot. For those taking the very, very long view, favoured sites to rent or purchase for archives include readymades like abandoned salt mines such as  Hutchison in Kansas, where Hollywood negatives are laid to rest, ‘For security. Forever’.[23] Seems like Dorothy and Toto are home for good now. [24] Any library, on the other hand, is a light archive; notwithstanding the relative miserliness or mad profligacy of its archivist-librarian, and whether, and to whom it may be permitted to touch the books; the collection is nonetheless, at least—albeit under certain conditions—available to the—or, at least, to certain—eyes.

But whose? In 1922, for example, the minute book of the First International Working Men’s Association was almost casually announced by the labour historian Raymond Postage, [25] in a footnote to his A Builder’s History, to be in the collection of the Bishopsgate Institute Library (Est. 1891)[26], archived at shelfmark 331.88;[27] and still more symbolically located, given the Bishopsgate’s location in the financial City of London.  People duly came and asked for it; and when, in due course, the Library’s possession of this bona fide piece of Marxiana eventually came to the attention of the Institutes’ governors, they—and the Chair of Governors in particular, one David Andijaromain, pretty much FREAKED. Out. And locked it in a bank vault; an act of radically conservative archiving. A contemporary draft letter from Charles Goss, the Institute’s then (highly notable though not-quite-first[28]) librarian[29] notes ‘several applications for permission to photostat or copy the contents of the archive by Communists, particularly during the period of the Russian Trades Delegation in London’ as having been consistently refused by the Governors,  who ‘latterly decided to safeguard it against such uses by lodging it in the care of their bankers’. The splinter wedged ever deeper in Capital’s maw!  Even an offer by the British Museum’s Trustees (to whom this letter is addressed) to take this hot potato off their hands, while under consideration, is treated with extreme caution by the Governors,  who first need to know whether ‘the volume would be made available to any and every reader and whr [sic] permission would be afforded to persons to copy or photostat the recorded minutes.’ [30]  Even so some people, it is implied, might possibly be entitled to see it; only God forbid this inflammatory—book—should set even the unwashed portion of London afire again.

 

The end of this very British book-fatwa[31] came in 1941 when at the request of Churchill’s own secretary, the book was eventually released into the custody of the then Soviet Ambassador Ivan Maisky, whose wife, along with two secretaries typed the minutes out word for word as the Blitz raged around. [32]

 

As for the book itself; from the entry for the meeting of July 9^th 1865, e.g., we learn that the Address of the General Council of the International Working Men’s Association, as proposed by Citizen Marx and seconded by Citizen Lefargue was unanimously adopted as ‘the first Congress resolution on the practical means, by which to enable the International Workingmen’s Association to fulfil its function of a common centre of action for the working classes, female and male, in their struggle tending to their complete emancipation from the domination of Capital.’ From the entry for July 23^rd 1865 e.g., we learn of a letter received by Citizen Marx ‘from Newark announcing the affiliation of the Communist Club, which rejects all revealed religion, and every not founded on the perception of concrete objects’, and further advocates ‘the destruction of individual property, the equality of all persons, and its members bind each other to carry these maxims into practice’.

 

Words of power, indeed; yet even such apparent banalities as demands for rent by the Landlord of their meeting rooms (one Mr Miall), or ‘Receipts, Expenditures and Liabilities from March 29^th 1865 – April 28^th 1866, Balance in hand 6.38-’,[33] hold potent secrets for the right historian[34], and there is something beautifully prosaic in learning, alongside e.g., the news from Switzerland that  ‘The Radical Bourgeois Committee of Fleurie called upon the Radical Bourgeois Committee of La Chaud de Fonds to fight against the social democratic tendencies of the International, which tended to overthrow social order and caused hatred between different classes’ that —‘Citizen Eccarius stated that he had taken notes of the last meeting, but had left them at his house’.  Between ourselves, having been restored to the public archive, the minute book itself was later subject to a greater carelessness than Eccarius’; discovered to be lost, no less, in the 1960s, upon the LSE’s applying to borrow it for an exhibition, only to be discovered 6 months later behind a box of toilet rolls. A story from the 1970s, in contrast, tells of members of the Chinese Communist Party visiting Britain ‘just to look at the Minute Book and then handing it round, and crying, and shaking—.’[35] How a thing may be laid low, and be raised up again.

 

As for the book itself,  that is, the book-thing; it is so smog patinated, glazed with the grease of so many handlings that it is hard to say if it started out eggshell-bruise-grey and became blackened in places, or vice versa. Thus, as surely befits such an auratic object, it appears to be bound not in card, nor in calf, nor in goatskin, but hammered-out thunder. Inside, the arboreal bookplate[36] boasts the motto Senesco non Segnesco: “I grow old but not rusty”.[37]

 

Here, then, indeed, is the matter in hand; for what is a library—‘from Latin libraria “bookshop”, feminine (used as a noun) of librarius “relating to books,” from liber, libr- “book”’[38]—if not a place for storing, restoring, and ordering, and in which to read book-things;  at a time when books, and libraries themselves, are, it seems, beginning to de-materialise? Of course, it is not that simple; besides the librarian being already the shepherd of so many more things than books, even the virtualized, u-topic[39] abstraction of “cloud storage” is ultimately anchored in the material topos; my data centre or yours?

 

And perhaps, after all, just as the word itself, “book”—from Old English bōc meaning any document or charter, said to be ‘of Germanic origin, related to Dutch boek and German Buch, and probably to beech[40] (on which runes were carved)’[41]— has migrated to mean “codex”, a word whose own material significance has also shifted over time;  perhaps then the book is indeed a candle—one lux—one lumen, meaning, in Latin, both “opening” and “light”;[42] one portable unit[43], one body[44] of knowledge; one portal, regardless of lamp-kind, or vehicle. [45] And yet. I sing of the bath-dipped, the folded corner; the senseless braille-graze of pulp. [46]

 

Ah. Perhaps if we bury them deep enough…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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