The mind of an archivist

It was recently brought to my attention that I don’t display photos of family or friends. Until it was mentioned it did not occur to me that this was odd. At least not odd enough to be worth mentioning. Yes, I don’t display photos of family or friends. In fact I barely bother to look at such pictures. It’s not that I don’t like people - although I would not call myself a “people person” - it’s just that I don’t think a picture of a person is particularly representative of the subject it displays. 

If you look up “archivist personality” on a search engine like Google you come up with a Myer-Briggs personality type of ISTJ or INTP. When I did a 10 minute online test I came up with INTJ-A. When I checked out the 16 different Myer-Briggs personality types I saw bits of myself in every one of them. An unschooled consumer reading the Myer-Briggs catalogue is akin to someone reading his horoscope then checking out the other signs/ types to which he does not belong. The inclination is to dine out on the smorgasbord of conveniently categorised delights while ignoring the flip side of each treat.

I’m no fan of personality profiles even as I understand their practical use. I have a strong belief that descriptors used in common conversation have a habit of shaping what they describe - either of the subject (if it is human) or in the mind of others. But if one liability describes my personality (ie it is a problem for me and is an annoyance for everyone else) then it would be the fact that I am an archivist.

An archivist needs order. He specifically doesn’t crave order because a craving would suggest that he doesn’t already have it. For whatever reason, and however he got there, order exists at the time an archivist finds his rhythm. He needs it, he builds on it, and, I assume, he dies with it. Or, maybe, an archivist’s defining trait dies when he evolves from it. I’m not sure. I’m not there yet. 

I remember going to the Natural History Museum in London way back in 1991. It was an awe-inspiring experience. Rows and rows and rows and rows of insects and vertebrates laid out before me, one floor on top of the other. Dead, annotated, and behind glass this might come across as boring or macabre to a modern day visitor and a revamped museum now provides a more interactive experience. Still worth visiting? Most certainly. But not the same as viewing the large collection of specimens now sitting somewhere in storage. I consider myself lucky to have visited the Natural History Museum before things got all virtual and interactive. I visited many times.

As a child I wanted to be a fighter pilot for the Royal Australian Airforce (RAAF). Australia had just purchased the FA-18 “Hornet” and I wanted to be in on it. I highly doubt I would have passed a personality test to take control of a very expensive, government-sanctioned weapon and, in any case, I didn’t have the necessary 20/20 vision. So, even if my confused and unfocussed brain could have gotten its act together, that would, quite simply, have been the end of that. Now - as a full grown adult - I own a small collection of 1/72 diecast model planes used by the RAAF. I’m not necessarily proud of it nor do I show it off to anyone apart from my 12yo nephew (who is distinctly uninterested). I had the option of getting a model of the RAAF F-35 “Lightning II” which, for many reasons, is a very significant piece of kit for the RAAF and for Australia’s strategic interests moving forward. After a few weeks deliberation I decided against it. The F-35 is not representative of the fighter plane I have in my brain but a quantum shift to a systems platform expanding in size and scope for use against peer and near-peer adversaries.

Rata-tat-tat Ka-pow

Top Gun Maverick

“the end is inevitable Maverick. Your kind is heading to extinction”

“Maybe so, sir, but not today.”

RAAF FA-18 Super Hornet

The F-22 

Still a fighter plane 

RAAF F-35

This is a systems platform..

.. with friends

Hello Dave.

The process was excruciating. Especially for something so small and inconsequential as a model plane.

A month earlier it took less than ten minutes to donate a substantially larger amount of coin to the Queensland Air Museum. This nonprofit organisation is staffed exclusively by volunteers, enthusiasts, and retired airmen - ie there are no salaried workers (although it may commission and pay for specialised work). Yet it maintains one of the largest collections of aircraft in Australia. I don’t consider myself an airplane enthusiast but I recognise the value of a good archive. And big, open archives are not cheap to run. I have visited the museum just once.

The archivist, as a personality trait, is trapped by discipline, order and reason. If you happen to like bicycles and, by some alignment of stars, grow up able to buy stuff you don’t actually need then you could end up where I am now. The history of the derailleur-equipped bicycle is deep and expansive but ultimately defined. And knowable. It can therefore be archived. This can be done in many ways and every archivist has his own system of getting it right. Every system is understandable and relatable if you have the time and patience to find out. I once wrote a blog about mine. You can read it if you like. That sentence is particularly telling as I now write a blog with a viewership of one.

Knowable, relatable, comforting.

So back to the fact, or rather the oddity, of me not displaying pictures of family and friends. It’s because I never thought about it. And I probably should have. Sure I have photos of family and friends. They are just put away in albums under specific events and timeframes. More recent photos are stored in the mess of virtual data on various electronic devices. I am, after all, an archivist not a weirdo. Which is another way of saying that my system is understandable and relatable if you have the time and patience to find out.

I have a picture hanging on a wall of Mikhail Tal playing Bobby Fischer at the Leipzig Olympiad in 1960. Below it sits a picture of Magnus Carlsen playing Judit Polgár in a park in Madrid at the time of the FIDE Candidates in 2022. They are chess players who I have never met and know little about. The top picture is an august image of two great players playing chess in what is now called a classical format. The bottom is of another two great players playing an informal game in a blitz format. Anyone familiar with chess will grasp the significance of the juxtaposition*. The two pictures close a loop. They sit well together on a wall. And they sit well together in my head.

The point is an archivist is very good at labelling things and putting them away. It’s a coping mechanism for a messy brain trying to get to grips with a messy world. A lot of stuff goes on inside my head. But, outside my head, there are real things and there are other things that represent real things. A bicycle you can ride is a real thing. A beetle, even when pinned to a card, is a real thing (albeit far removed from the complete real thing). A virtual stegosaurus, a photo of a person, and a model plane are, in essence, stand ins for the real thing. I’m not saying that they are not beautiful, or that they are not useful or meaningful but unless they transcend what they represent they are not the real thing. The problem is they often do, and they are often treated as if they are. That’s because the human brain has the annoying tendency of adding extra dimensions to the information relayed in from the senses. A virtual stegosaurus gets connected to the bones of an archeological dig, information gleaned from a book, a childhood memory of toy dinosaur, and, of course, the loving grandmother with awesome hugs who gave the child that toy. 

“Non-things” become “things” when we package the abstraction.

An archivist is obsessed with objectivity, More accurately, he assiduously strips subjectivity from things, places and events regardless of how fruitless or demeaning that is. He will never be successful as he, like every other human, is fallible. A picture of someone you care about is, frankly, one person away from being just another photo print or array of pixellated dots. Especially these days with so many eyes fixated on so many screens. It is also not the real thing. In fact, it is a billion, gazillion data points short of the real thing. A picture has no smell, no sound, no narration and no animation. It cannot capture the stuff that happens in the company of that person nor the changeable nature of the relationship. If the subject is someone you care about then you already know this. But here I am stating the obvious.

Humans create archives to reinforce synaptic connections that would otherwise evolve and move on. It is, by definition, reflective. The archivist is simply someone who frets about when and what gets locked in an archive. He sees the enigmatic convolutions of the human brain resolved in a simple equation: reality with depths of meaning + social animal → search for an underlying commonality if such a thing actually exists. The process of growing up is, in part, an attempt to make sense of a complex, messy world. This is not an easy task that comes naturally. For an archivist what is individually important to one person is often just that and rarely more. A complex riddle that might change over time as, indeed, many things do. But taking a rigorous, unnatural approach appears to be an unsatisfying solution for many people. Nevertheless the archivist persists in drawing lines between the world we experience in our heads and the one we share outside. His belief is that archives should serve as anchors for a shared reality.

An archivist knows better than to pin down a cloud. It belongs in the sky. Do not take it to mean that he doesn’t appreciate it for everything that it is.

* Magnus Carlsen decided not to defend his World Championship title at the FIDE Candidates when FIDE did not acquiesce to his request to include faster format games (in addition to the slower, classical format). Many believe FIDE is lagging behind and losing an audience that has increasing shifted to faster formats where slight imprecision in play opens up opportunities and, in many cases, makes a game more exciting. Also, Magnus played to Judit’s strengths when he chose the Sicilian to Judit’s e4 opening (a game which Judit won in a show of sportsmanship and camaraderie from both parties).