i am in the grip of fever. in the derridean sense, that is.

there is the destruction that takes place with the construction of an archive when, in choosing what to keep, we are also choosing what to forget. last week i sorted through all the letters and cards i’ve kept from all through my life. reading through each one as i re-organised them into a new storage box, i put them into stacks. cards and letters in one pile, programs from performances i’ve been involved in and travel memorabilia in another. ex-boyfriends get their own pile. and a fourth pile - things i no longer want to keep. in choosing what not to preserve, i am re-constructing my future experience of that archive - the next time i go through that box, i will experience my past differently to the way i did this time, just as this was different to the last time (and that cull).

and then there is the destruction born of the accident. the kind that i, of course, am so prone to.

i’m in the process of moving my blog to a new domain and new server space from a host in the states. i figure it will be easier to manage, and i no longer have to trouble poor kat, konvolut’s long-suffering and lovely cyber-admin-accountant. i’m going to start a whole new blog, and i’m going to lay this one to rest - pack it up in an archival folder, put it away to look back on when i’m in need of memory aids for the last 5 years of my blogged life. and in my attempt to preserve and re-house my digital archives, i have gone and destroyed some of it. (not that i expect anyone to, but) if you’re going through some old posts and find some of the photos and videos missing, it’s because i accidentally deleted 104 of 123 files i had in my images folder. don’t ask how - it doesn’t matter. the point is that i did it accidentally, felt the briefest moment of anguish, before realising that actually, it was really a rather apt thing to have happened.

in archiving, something is always destroyed, whether you mean to do it, or not.

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