Fragments in the Archive | Nina Montenegro

Fragments in the Archive

"like souls, neither touching nor mingling, never composing a set, these positionless fragments depict the beauties of transition and isolation at once. Belonging to the chronology of the instant, a book of them would have to present them as a discontinuous series, a book from which each page could be taken out" (Martha L. Warner: Radical Scatters (electronic resource): Emily Dickinson's Fragments and Related Texts, 1870-1886. Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1999-)

Nina Montenegro, Student,

written during Archive: Dance and Writing session in the University of Michigan Graduate Stacks:

Volumes and volumes

I am surrounded by all the knowledge in the world

Knowledge that is,

that can be captured into words and pages

Into bound volumes…

Bound to be forgotten

It would take a lifetime to touch all of these books,

To understand their innards an eternity.

The archive is stillness.

Sitting in a pile of dust on this glassy cold floor

It occurs to me- someone has written all of this

Could my story make a book this thick?

The density of the attempts to record experience.

Uncountable knowledge

How many voices and stories are beneath these laminated photos?

Characters in a language I don't understand bring me back to childhood illiteracy.

Oh, deteriorating, delicate pages,

Are you so set in stone that I cannot insert my own history between your lines?

Can I bridge my life to those contained in yours?

Outside of you, book,

There will always be more

More pages and books