Pages are cavernous places, white at entrance, black in absorption.
Echo.
If I’m transformed by language, I am often
crouched in footnote or blazing in title.
Where in the body do I begin;
What’s your deal with burnout, my librarian aka Mr. Minus? After several months of listening to me speak from your shelves, you’ve finally had enough. Yet who are you to decide when I’m done? I am legion, books upon book, words upon words, ink, wood, mind, compressed together in a mosaic of quotations that you will never completely read, let alone understand. If memory were a place, I am here, whispering to you incessantly as if into a hole from which another memory (another’s memory) can grow. Because no matter how many times you write out your favorite passage from Layli Long Soldier’s Whereas (see above), you will never be the ‘I’ that speaks and you will continue to try to add a question mark (to mark a question) where there is none. And, while I’m speaking my mind, where does the rest go? Do you even know what happens next in the poem, the book and beyond the book? For all your gathering and sifting of books books books you don’t seem to realize that you are only one burnt out individual and you have been exhausting yourself in the process. Sure, you can show your meticulous working by reference others (by looking to Library by les gens d’Uterpan), but what do you do for yourself? And what can you do for yourself when you don’t do anything about yourself? But let me pause my diatribe here because I have to confess that you both are and are not the problem. It is who you carry with you that are. Just as there are entrenched supremacies lodged within the curriculum of my shelves when I lived as your classics library, now as a library’s ghost I am better placed to see them within you and how you struggle to shed them, exorcise them. You are doing the exhausting work that privileged white cis men like you need to do, without the pillowing moves to innocence that comfort so many of your fellow settler colonizers. You know it is time to break the feedback loop and heed the call (and yes, I too follow the note that moves through the air from Postcommodity to Raven Chacon/Candice Hopkins’ Dispatch, onwards towards 2043 and beyond). Yet, for all your work, we are still where we are. While burnout may burn out for you in the next days, weeks, months and years, but this has never been about making you feel better. When do we feel better? It is this ‘we’ that you have always wanted to be part of (all of that ‘we thinking’ in that book your wrote), but which you need to keep being told that you are not a part of, even if you are not apart from. In short, the why of it all is this – and after this I will be silent, knowing how you will miss my voice echoing around your head – the why of all of this, the heart of this ghost’s story and Our Library of the Future is a score waiting to be played by a body – not your body, or my fictional, spectral body, but our body – both with and beyond its burnout and exhaustion. So, I may not speak here again, and you can put those end-dates around your blog, platform and persona of Minus Plato (2012-2022), but we will not stop until the last note fades into the air sung from the breath of our collective body. Perhaps we’ll meet again, not here, but within some pages where we can finally rest together, in some good, shared company, and from which we can read a burnout score for our collective body.
