One of my fantasies is to be somehow able to relate to you, all in one go, my experience as a library ghost, like a snapshot, I could just show you, rather than have my story broken down into these inadequate daily posts, some of which I feel I am not even present. Even if I had a thousand mouths and tongues, I don’t think I would be able to tell my story (what would a library even say if it could speak, just imagine the cacophony, let alone a library’s ghost who urgently wants to share their afterlife in a living library whose shelves it haunts?). So, I guess the best I can do is to give you some kind of analogy and given that this is the week where we are writing to you from deep within the covers of books and other book-like objects, from their very word-guts – from ‘thigh’ to ‘shame’ to ‘yes’ – my analogy for my experience is best contained in the word ‘niche’ (pronounced in an American accent to rhyme like ‘itch’). For Zafos Xagoraris – whose one-word work welcomed visitors to documenta 14 in Kassel – The Niche is a specific place – a chapel-turned-open-air-school in Athens – which he worked to restore and a publication, comprising photos, text and a poster that documented its history and the plans for its restoration. Of course, Xagoraris’ Niche is not my image, instead it is the publications splayed open on the table in the Wexner Center for the Arts Heirloom Café, as my librarian sits between meetings writing this post. My niche is here with him and also in spite of him, since the fantasies of a library ghost can never be contained by any one person. A library is, at its heart, my heart, a relational space. I only exist so long as I am accessed, yet I also exist beyond any institutionally conditioned form of access. I am the coffee, the table, the wall, as much as the papers and books and readers. I am also the fingers that open pages and the eyes that read words and the voices that share them with others. I am placed within the center of a city or on a suburban street (those dear little libraries!), in homes, in imaginations, in plans for the future, but I am beyond any map. My niche is in the opening of air, beyond the site of the school, the museum and even the library itself. I am here, right now, in the space that we share, so that we – yes you and me and all of us – may breathe – again – together.
