# Neutrality

##Searching for weak signals of neutrality

We are walking through the para-fictional ruins of a vast, ancient archive —
(— a what?)  
— an archive, the [house of the ruler](_ "<h4>From the prologue of <em>In the Dream House</em> by Carmen Maria Machado, page 2</h4> <p>“In her essay ‘Venus in Two Acts,’ on the death of contemporaneous African accounts of slavery, Saidiya Hartman talks about the ‘violence of the archive.’ This concept — also called ‘archival silence’—illustrates a difficult truth: sometimes stories are destroyed, and sometimes they are never uttered in the first place; either way something very large is irrevocably missing from our collective histories. 
The word archive, Jacques Derrida tells us, comes from the ancient Greek ἀρχεῖον: arkheion, ‘the house of the ruler’. 
When I first learned about this etymology, I was taken with the use of house (a lover of haunted house stories, I’m a sucker for architecture metaphors), but it is the power, the authority, that is the most telling element. What is placed in or left out of the archive is a political act, dictated by the archivist and the political context in which she lives. 
This is true whether it’s a parent deciding what’s worth  recording  of  a  child’s  early life or — like  Europe  and  its Stolpersteine, its ‘stumbling blocks’ — a continent publicly reckoning with its past. Here is where Sebastian took his first fat-footed baby steps; here is the house where Judith was living when we took her to her death. 
Sometimes the proof is never committed to the archive — it is not considered important enough to record, or if it is, not important enough to preserve. 
Sometimes there is a deliberate act of destruction: consider the more explicit letters between Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok, burned by Hickok for their lack of discretion. Almost certainly erotic and gay as hell, especially considering what wasn’t burned. (‘I’m getting so hungry to see you’). 
The late queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz pointed out that ‘queerness has an especially vexed relationship to evidence... When the historian of queer experience attempts to document a queer past, there  is  often a gate keeper, representing a straight present. 
What gets left behind? Gaps where people never see themselves or find information about themselves. Holes that make it impossible to give oneself a context. 
Crevices people fall into. Impenetrable silence. </p>
<p>The complete archive is mythological, possible only in theory; somewhere in Jorge Luis Borges’s Total Library, perhaps, buried under the detailed history of the future and his dreams and half dreams at dawn on August 14, 1934. 
But we can try. ‘How does one tell impossible stories?’ Hartman asks, and she suggests many avenues: ‘advancing a series of speculative arguments,’ ‘exploiting the capacities of the subjunctive (a grammatical mood that expresses doubts, wishes, and possibilities)’, writing history ‘with and against the archive,’ ‘imagining what cannot be verified.’”</p> "). Where traces, historical documents and records are kept. It has many levels, or layers if you will. The ground is covered in deteriorating, old pages that are crispy, crumpled and thin. We can hear them crunch under our feet as we walk carefully. On our sides large structures are holding the documents that are still intact in organized sections. They're high up, out of reach, and look fresh and glossy. Beyond them, somewhere atop these tall systems we can hear repetitive shouts going forth and back, from the archive’s last remaining oral history re-tellers. As we continue walking we get to a cleared [circle on the ground](_ "<img src='https://safe.justfortherecord.space/s/GHk8zCNEtRj3Rjm/preview'>"){.picture .clearing}, no old documents crunching under our feet anymore, just a clean circle. Stopping inside it for a moment we hear a whole cacophony overhead of [oral history being shouted](_ "<img src='https://safe.justfortherecord.space/s/JLnD8xkw4xXc8wq/preview'>"){.picture .perrot}. Echoes reiterated over and over, with only small changes and modulations. Some pieces of history chanted in unison, others single and solitary tunes almost faded to nothing. Their sources are out of sight, but we can assume we're standing under a great concentration.


Why the floor is cleared to a clean circle we can’t work out, but we spot several smaller paths connecting at this spot. Unlike the larger, official routes further down in the archive, where we see schoolchildren guided along in great droves by their trusty teachers, these paths seem to wriggle through the closer packed and less overviewable parts of the archive. Directions staked out by [desires not yet anticipated](_ "<h4>From <em>Wikipedia:</em> A desire path </h4> <p> Often referred to as a desire line in transportation planning, and also known as a game trail, social trail, fishermen trail, herd path, cow path, elephant path, goat track, pig trail, use trail, and bootleg trail. A desire path is a path created as a consequence of erosion caused by human or animal foot traffic. The path usually represents the shortest or most easily navigated route between an origin and destination. The width and severity of erosion are often indicators of the traffic level that a path receives. Desire paths emerge as shortcuts where constructed paths take a circuitous route, have gaps, or are non-existent.")  in the archive's original design. Slashing categories, crossing sections and squeezing between room-dividers. We pick out a path from the cleared circle haphazardly and keep walking. Crunch, crunch, we plod on. We're on a search after all. 

Walking a combination of smaller paths we find our way to the periphery of the archive, all the way up and all the way out, where we can catch a glimpse of its edges. We come to a high wall sticking right up with a makeshift ladder which we climb, and once up on the wall we look around and see the archive stretched out resembling a landscape below us. Its dense top layers form a protective brim. From here we also spot the only thing taller than us, the control posts that stand by every gate. Frameworks built for observation, poking out of the archive's [carapace](_ "<h4>From  <em>Winter </em> by Ali Smith, page 98 </h4> <br>– and then there's the farmer whose name I can't remember but who lived in America hundreds of years later and who loved snowflakes so much that he invented a camera with a microscope actually inside it, imagine  –
<br>(wow –)
<br>– to take close-up photos of individual snow crystals. And he was out walking in a blizzard one day and he died too–
<br>(oh no –)
<br>So. What about that lost child, then? Lost in snow so heavy, so laden on the branches of the trees above but so glistening in what moonlight manages to break through the less thick places, that the snow forms a cold but moonlit and protective carapace from one end of the wood to the other, which leads straight to the gates of the underworld.
<br>(What's a carapace?)
<br>It's a caravan that goes at a great pace.
<br>(Is it?)
<br>Ha ha! you believed me! No, really it's the word for, like, a shell, like the one a tortoise or a crab has on it's back, the hard thing that protects their soft insides from the outside world. It's also a word for something that covers you over and protects you.
<br>(Like armour?)" ) We mocklingly stare back at their silently observing architecture and just [sit there for a while](_ "<h4> Dialogue : </h4> <br>
<br>(– Still no sign of it?)
<br>
<br>(– Nope. )
<br>
<br>" ), before climbing down and heading in towards the center of the structure again, tucking ourselves in under the shield of the [top layer](_ "<img src='https://safe.justfortherecord.space/s/EG47LSrZwnjqgz2/preview'>"){.picture .layers}, walking down some passages, towards the 7th and lowest layer again. 

We observe the visiting schoolchildren using the  [search engine](_ "<h4> From <em>Winter</em> by Ali Smith, page 192. </h4> <br>Google, his mother says. The <em>new</em> new found land. Not so long ago it was only the mentally deranged, the unworldly pedants, the imperialists and the naivest of schoolchildren who believed that encyclopaediae gave you any equivalence for the actual world, or any real understanding of it. And door-to-door salesmen sold them, and they were never to be trusted. And even the authorized encyclopaediae, even them we never mistook for or accepted as any real knowledge of the world. But now the world trusts search engines without a thought. The canniest door-to-door salesman ever invented. Never mind foot in the door. Already right at the heart of the house." ) over at the other side of a big open space. They seem to be stuck [running in a circle](_ "<img src='https://safe.justfortherecord.space/s/EXZX3gKxWb4C3Hf/preview'>"){.picture .vortex}. It might be jammed in motion. Perhaps they don’t know that it's programmed to always give the same results. We let them run. [A bot sniffs](_ "<img src='https://safe.justfortherecord.space/s/BBGdj88RKQLtLzE/preview'>"){.picture .dog} at us, trying to identify who we are. We reach out a hand, but it goes to warn its administrator. The admin takes contact but we are free to go as soon as we have confirmed our non-bot identities. 

We decide to keep to the wasteland, the forgotten parts of the archive. Although as we inspect it closer it might be less forgotten than most people seem to think, some of its structures clearly still in use even if they are not any longer maintained, as if it still has a form of [embodied cognition](_ "<h4> From <em>Other Minds</em> by Peter Godfrey-Smith, page 74:</h4>
<br>The octopus is sometimes said to be a good illustration of the importance of a theoretical movement in psychology known as embodied cognition. These ideas were not developed to apply to octopuses, but to animals in general, including ourselves, and this view has also been influenced by robotics. One central idea is that your body itself, rather than our brain, is responsible for some of the ‘smartness’ with which we handle the world. Our body's own structure encodes some information about the environment and how we must deal with it, so not all this information needs to be stored in the brain. The joints and angles of our limbs, for example, make motions such as walking naturally arise. Knowing how to walk is partly a matter of having the right body. As Hillel Chiel and Randall Beer put it, an animal's body structure creates both constraints and opportunities, which guide its action." ). Nonetheless it has been a long journey. We came to the archive looking for an otherworldly idea, or a trace of it at least. We decide to call it a day, to make our way out. Pacing desired paths and planned paths, making our way through 7 layers up and out. We shake our heads.
<em>What will become of this place?</em>
And then, for a split second, it [jumps out in front of us ](_ "<h4> In unison : </h4> <br>
<br> (— did you see that?!)                                                                                                           (— did you see that?!)  
<br>
<br>
<br>" ) –  
We quickly glance at each other, as if to check if the other person has seen it too, and when we look back, [it is gone ](_ "<h4> Dialogue : </h4> <br>
<br> (— We saw it right?)
<br> (— I think so?)
<br>
<br>" ).
Perfect neutrality. In its brown, copper fur, leaping, mid air, arms and legs stretched out, face calm, looking like the elementary illustration of itself. A flawless image of an idea. Apparently it holds multitudes beyond language in its mouth. Apparently it only takes it 300 milliseconds to recalculate the perfect place to fall if it is cast off its course by any unforeseen turbulence. A truly [para-fictional creature ](_ "<img src='https://safe.justfortherecord.space/s/RZr4x449MsYJg82/preview'>"){.picture .squirrel}.

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