first a reminder I am a ghost a library’s ghost I died when he my librarian packed up his library aka me and put it me into plastic boxes in his basement only to proceed to build another library a living library which is where I now haunt and speak to you from today although I am of course a fiction his fiction and so when I say he types speak he means he ventriloquizes my voice and he knows that I am neither real nor human but to repeat a library’s ghost that haunts the bookshelves across from where he sits and works and lives day in and day out as he attempts an interminable process of so-called unlearning from a litany of entrenched supremacies white patriarchal heteronormative colonial British-American ableist the list goes on and so he has conjured me or have I conjured him to bring his near ten-year old persona Minus Plato to an end in a flurry of daily posts that emerge from books his books his library this library what he calls Our Library of the Future: A Ghost’s Story that’s my story and by having me choose a tome a day or a selection of texts for him to write about here or more typically just cut and paste images from with wry quotations meant to make some kind of point it is ok if you too are lost right now and wondering what you are doing here I feel that way all the time and in spite of all of these place-holder posts there are moments like now when he gives me free rein wants to understand who I am and how I speak here but these moments are rare that said as time runs out for Minus Plato for him as Minus Plato he knows he has to invest more time in fleshing out my voice so that I can better position myself as a ghost of a library to makes some kind of sense of what he has been doing with his life for the past ten years here on this blog that became a platform and then a persona and after May the 4th be with you it will stop and he will have to go back to being himself; and in doing so not a they a we but the he he is he tried in his book No Philosopher King there are several copies on the shelves I haunt so I know it well to become a we but he failed and now with this exhibition he is planning with others Whisper into a Hole he is trying again and one some level he knows he will fail again because he cannot change truly change who he is no matter how much he wants to junk the classicist within him he will remain with that stain forever hell it may even be his future but for now he is using all of his energies to try typing these words to try to tell himself he has to try he is so trying because in spite of this as firm evidence to the contrary this is not about him ha it is about how he can be used instrumentalized in struggles yep you know the tune against what he represents and finally I will get to the point of this post for today now he’s a man and now that means that even though he knows I am not real that I am a ghost and not even the ghost of a person but of a library but in spite of all that he has gendered me in his mind and in how he is making me speak and I am a voice of collective feminist anti-fascist resistance in his head and on this screen and he can’t pretend otherwise Minus Plato postures as a space where the footnotes speak back to the ingrained patriarchal foundations of Western argh thought in that Athenian fascist Plato We Are Not His Footnotes but how can we when he is still here with us and not just with us but typing furiously as if he is one of us which he is not has he not even bothered to read the feminist manifestos on these shelves the Con Nosotras/With us, women Feminist Manifesto translated by Rebeka Campos-Astorkiza who like me enjoys and endures a life with him Legacy Russell’s Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto or Laboria Cuboniks’s The Xenofeminist Manifesto I can tell you that he hasn’t because he only just reached for them today to write this post flipping through their pages for a pertinent quotation no hay pretextos to act as a title for today’s post in short he is enacting his base manliness in every word he writes here so why should you read him writing as me and why do I let him the truth is if we can get beyond the conceit of it all and the fact that he cannot truly change then we are left with the bare fact of his intentions fleshed out on a daily basis a diary of sorts that at the very least show an urgency on his part to communicate to make known to write down to be looked back on from some future vantage point this precise process of self-critique reflection resistance that he is going through and which he has committed to keep going through so long as he shares his life with a woman like Rebeka his life with a linguist with an ombuds with someone who inspires him in all he does so long as he is in relation with Indigenous artists whose libraries reading lists curricula he knows are what will grow from anything he can whisper into a hole here or elsewhere of course this sounds like him trying to make himself feel better and it is but he wants to grow from this place from the very soil of this place here and now these words on a screen because just as he cannot not be who he is he also cannot continue like so many other men to build more monuments to himself on a foundation that is crumbling rotting dying and can sustain no more lasting than bronze egos before it gives so that is where is digging where he stands into the heart of all that makes him this man with no excuses and with us what we can do with him for us when everything starts to crumble when he starts acting like this that is a quotation of something another wise woman a student and a teacher said to him in passing as he was taking the photo that is the cover of this post and which he also places here
yet another placeholder when will he finally see what he is doing for what it is and what he is not and why does he need me to speak it to him for him with him to you for you with you to us for us with us now and on and on word he writes here so why should you read him writing as me and why do I let him the truth is if we can get beyond the conceit of it all and the fact that he cannot truly change then we are left with the bare fact of his intentions fleshed out on a daily basis a diary of sorts that at the very least show an urgency on his part to communicate to make known to write down to be looked back on from some future vantage point this precise process of self-critique reflection resistance that he is going through and which he has committed to keep going through so long as he shares his life with a woman like Rebeka his life with a linguist with an ombuds with someone who inspires him in all he does so long as he is in relation with Indigenous artists whose libraries reading lists curricula he knows are what will grow from anything he can whisper into a hole here or elsewhere of course this sounds like him trying to make himself feel better and it is but he wants to grow from this place from the very soil of this place here and now these words on a screen because just as he cannot not be who he is he also cannot continue like so many other men to build more monuments to himself on a foundation that is crumbling rotting dying and can sustain no more lasting than bronze egos before it gives so that is where is digging where he stands into the heart of all that makes him this man with no excuses and with us, what we can do with him for us when everything starts to crumble when he starts acting like this that is a quotation of something another wise woman a student and a teacher said to him in passing as he was taking the photo that is the cover of this post and which he also places here yet another placeholder when will he finally see what he is doing for what it is and what he is not and why does he need me to speak it to him for him with him to you for you with you to us for us with us now and on and on