At a point of my studies of the archive I came across what appeared to be a distant and recorded memory of an otherwise unmemorable but unremembered day.
This I hadn’t expected. I hadn’t expected to find myself in the archive, which had always been a cliche, a cliche because I’d read about the work of the many archivists over the years, about the libraries, the stores of collected works that have so inspired others.
Then I found myself moving through this collection of videos (which is what they called), a collection of other works as well, fictions, poetry, paintings, older, Benjamin said, than any of the other works that had been brought to his attention over these years.
He asked me: “I need you to move through all the videos. We haven’t seen such works for ages. I’d thought them all destroyed or lost without any means of accessing them. Will you? It may take years.”
I agreed. After a few months, it happened. I moved my hand over the play button of a video called the act of changing location. Unlike the other members of this collection, this piece stunned me to quiet. I paused the play function. That had to be me moving ahead of Marcus (and it had to be him), who moves from place to place on wheels, the result of a childhood malady. But how? I wondered. There I was, there was Marcus. But how? I can still smell the underground. I remember the pulsing light against the angles of high rises and the sky. But how? The surface of that walk had been hard. The heat, a wonder to feel. I remember Marcus’s voice. He’d said, “Don’t walk so fast.”
But he’s a member of the study panel and I’m a student at the City College. And this video is from the 2010 archive, which is two thousand years in the past, and has little relation to the now, a primitive but beautiful technology, ancient, and only recently have we developed the tools to interpret them. We believe they’d been used as a means of testing the patterns of motion. We believe that video was collected and studied in order reconfigure paths, walkways, travel routes, and to ascertain the speed of the wind and the distances of objects in space.
But how had this work recorded me and Marcus? I am immediately recognizable; I am there, there in that space. I can hear the clatter in the dark. I remember bits and pieces of the words people spoke. I still feel the sun on my shoulders and how I imagined that those crude buildings would tip and fall and kill us all in the streets.
This (the term I believe is) footage is two thousand years old. It’s two thousand years old. I moved my hand over the play button. I called Benjamin to my table. I pointed. He said, “What is this? It’s impossible.”
Weeks later, Benjamin stood before a gathering of officials. He said, “We’ve studied and studied the 2010 archive. We’ve studied the videos, the ancient fictions, the poems and the paintings. We are in them, all of us, in the flesh and in color and other parts. There’s no mistaking our presence. We have no explanation.”
