Special Archives

    You wanna be immortal? Have you ever wanted to break from this pathetic mortal coil, and become what perhaps none have truly been before? Are you the kind of person who disagrees with the cruel coldness of the universe, always wishing somewhere deep down to look up at the sky and say, “Hey buddy, fuck you!” Do you want to then raise your middle finger into the air, high and stiff, and say with bravado; “you don’t get to determine when I leave, you fuck!” Well then do I have a fun new option for you.

    What is left of us when we're gone? All that we are, the breathing, fearing machine that we call our bodies, will soon end. Wanting will stop, loving will stop, hating will stop. We all stop eventually. The memories we create for those we touched soon fade, along with the faces of those who held them. Just like you, my sweet immortality-craving fool, everything you ever created, everything you ever are and will be will one day fade into nothing. Everyone you impressed with your big intellect, everyone you seduced with your infallible wit and beauty, everyone you killed, all gone. Gone like you will be one day too.

    So, what is there to do about this silly universal consistency, you might ask yourself. What could we possibly do as mere humans to preserve one person? Our bodies tend to crap out around eighty, and our minds even sooner sometimes. Oh, but a century is such a short time, don’t you think? What about two centuries, how about three? Hell, if we’re gunning for immortality, we should set our sights on something that can possibly preserve us, and dare I say the most idiotic concept humans ever invented, forever? Could anyone really be that important? 

    A silly question, because of course you are! You, just like ancient kings of old, influential writers, statesmen, labor organizers, teachers, community leaders, and every other human who made some kind of lasting impact, surely can never let yourself fade from the face of this earth! No! Fuck that! All that ego’s gotta go somewhere!

    Well, do I have an option for you. Welcome to the Boise State Special Collections and Archives! Here, you can live out your eternity in - oh lookie here - forty whole boxes, just for you! Everything you were, or rather, everything that the archivists responsible for corralling your legacy deem important enough to keep, can sit esto perpetua on the second floor of a midsize city’s university library! Oh you lucky dog, you’ll surely never be forgotten now.

    Your buddy wants to ask you a question after you've passed? Easy! Just send them over to Boise State’s Albertson’s Library’s Special Collections and Archive! While they’re there, they can ask the oh-so-friendly archivists who dedicate themselves day and night (Hours of operation, Tuesday - Thursday 10am-4pm, Monday and Friday 9am-5pm by request) to preserve what we humans so desperately need to be kept preserved.

    Did you send a letter to someone with marginal importance during the 1920s? Bam! You get a place in the archive! Did you pass anti-gay legislation? Bam! You get a place in the archive! Did you get arrested sometime in the mid to late 1950s? BAM! In the Archive you go! How easy it is to get in here!

    Still, sound too hard to get yourself into this most illustrious morgue? Well don’t worry, there are tons of ways of getting in! All you need to do is find some way to appear in as many documents as possible now, in this lifetime. Surely, if you make a big enough stink, that smell will reverberate throughout history, kept as fresh as the day you made it for as long as this great institution shall stand.

    Take, for instance, the Idaho Aryan correspondence and newsletters. All the hateful words spilled like rotting milk from the mouths of pale-skinned monsters kept in pristine condition put right up next to our copies of Idaho’s civil rights legislation, how handy. Every little morsel of writing those fucks did is kept in the best conditions possible, organized neatly into easy-to-leaf thought boxes for any curious and lightly antisemitic undergrad to find at a moment's notice. And hey wow would you look at that? All they had to do to be immortalized forever was being fucking nazis! Doesn’t sound too hard now, does it?

    Maybe you don’t want to commit heinous hate crimes and still want to be remembered. Okay, a bit tricky, but there are definitely other options. Can you write? Can you write just well enough to become a locally influential writer, or prolific editor in a newspaper? Well, you’ve got about a fifty percent chance, but that's better than nothing, right? And hey, don’t forget, for every famous person you send a letter to, your immortality is that much closer to being achieved.

    But okay, what if you're a talentless hack who just wants to reach for immortality to have just one thing that makes your pitiful life meaningful. What if you have nobody to remember you once you've passed, no family to keep your pictures and send them into the archive, no children to continue your legacy, your philosophies? What is left for a poor, sad sack like you?

    Well, all you have to do, my sweet corner cutter, is bargain your misery for immortality. Yes, yes that’s right, make no mistake dear friend, the emotion with the longest shelf life is misery. Now, you may not have yourself the dozens or hundreds of boxes that our noble senators or governors get to live their afterlives through, but by god, they will keep a folder for you. But only if your misery is sufficiently what they would call: historically important. How dull is that? We oughta to be honest with our labelings. Most historically significant? No no. Most dramatic. That's the honest truth.

    Unfortunately, if you try this route, much like the thousands of other miserable folks who find themselves haunting the second story of our beautiful Albertsons library, you will be placed in what they call a ‘less processed’ collection. Okay, fine but what does that mean?

    Unlike a stack such as, say, Cecil Andrus or the Aryan Nation, you miserable fucks will be lumped in an unlabeled box. Unlike the brave explorers of our grandiose Idaho wilderness, or the generals who helped slaughter the natives to allow us to build our great Libraries - whose legacies are meticulously cared for and organized seventeen ways to Sunday in boxes just for them - the miserable are locked away together. Like a mass grave of sorts; a way for us to keep some logical consistency in our society.

    Join the likes of Mary, who, at fourteen, was raped by her family's unapproved husband, and was whisked away to Boise for an unlawful abortion. Mary was caught, arrested, and tried for her crime, of course, all only days after being cajoled into losing her baby. Mary’s exquisite misery is kept in pristine condition in our wonderful library through the court documents that painstakingly walk through her moment in the sun. Every word she said to the police investigators who grilled her for five painstaking hours. In an unlabeled folder, in a partly sorted box.

    Examining and cross-examining the truth of the story of her fateful examination. There’s probably nothing else about Mary in that entire archive. We never get to know if she was sweet, ambitious, or stubborn. We don’t get to know what she wanted to do with her life if she had plans or dreams. But we do get to know that the doctors made her look at her aborted child only seconds after the procedure. We also know she didn't want to look, and that she did.

    Can you beat that? Well, Anne sure could! And Susan, Imogene, Betty, Hector, David, or Mark. Hundreds of others, car accidents, murders, assaults, each dripping with sweet misery of their own; shoved into unlabeled boxes somewhere on the bottom shelves of a room nobody can enter but a select few.

    Suffering is so often done away like this, we shouldn't be at all surprised. In fact, we should see this as the perfect way to be remembered. Sure, we don’t consider humanity’s suffering to be worth more than our achievements, but we sure will keep it. We will keep it under lock and key, like some dark secret, slowly eating us away from the inside. All are kept in Albertson Library’s Special collections and archives. Aren't we lucky?

    If you find yourself so lucky as to have your misery immortalized in our great libraries, along with this comes freedom from Humanity’s greatest foe, Shame. That green, viscous feeling sticks with us every waking moment, dragging us to the ground with every step. See; shame, unlike wonder, joy, and misery, has the shortest of shelf lives in the afterlife. Perhaps it's because of the emotions' wonderful sticking power while we’re alive. Pride washes off of us as easily as water off a duck’s back, but shame not so. While people will remember and keep your achievements and moments of great happiness if you're wealthy, and keep and remember your misery and suffering if you are poor, the shame of all of us dies just as quickly.

    Shame might very well be the only emotion that differentiates us from any other animal. Do you think a dog would feel shame after eating shit it found on the ground? Would a cat feel shame for scratching on your favorite leather shoes? Would a squirrel feel shame for pretending to bury its nuts to trick its brother? No. Shame is for us. Only for us.

    Appropriate then, for shame to be the stickiest of feelings. Keep what makes you unique, right? In many ways we are the animal of shame, a ‘Great Hairless Shame Ape’ some animals must call us. If they can even conceptualize shame itself that is. How wrong it must look, to the animal kingdom at large, to see us do what is obviously something in our best interests, only to turn around and rebuke that action only because another one of us was watching. What animal should feel bad for killing? Does any other animal plan to kill like we do? Does any other animal make misery on purpose? Would any other animal really even care?
    
    Shame in many ways acts as our community bonding agent. Our great evolutionary tool. Something to keep us crazy hairless monkeys all together. We feel shame for joy, we feel shame for pain, we feel shame for being alone, we feel shame for being around one another. Hell, we feel shame for just waking up in the morning. Shame keeps us on the straight and narrow, shame holds us to our morals. Morals are just another thing we invented to hold back the waves of shame like the artificial walls in the ocean off the coast of The Netherlands that have saved thousands of lives. Without it, we fear we may drown. Therefore, our world revolves around shame. We wear the right clothes because of shame and speak correctly because of shame. Shame is what we live for.

    So many live their lives in the shadow of it, never truly seeing the sun that all animals bask in at all times. They can’t even be aware of how sunny it really is over there. Funny then, that the only time we are finally released from the prison that biology created in our minds, is in death. Shame has its way with us our entire lives, pulling on our invisible strings, and teaching us to hate. Then, in our final moments, not enough time left to truly feel the peace with which we are awarded, we are released from its grasp. Cruel joke.

    Then sweeps in the Boise State Special Collections and Archives! Like a syphilis-ridden prospector panning for the last remaining gold in the hills of a boomtown (post-boom), the Boise State Special Collections and Archives will be happy to let the shame of your life wash away with your soul as they collect all the last remains of your pain and joy. File it away forever, and make everyone forget the shame those actions were born from.

    Is it a shame that drives us to want to stay around forever? If we did not feel self-hatred for so long while we lived, would we even wish to remain after we are gone? Appropriate then, that the catalogs have a hard time holding shame. It is a hard thing to hold someone else's shame, nearly impossible. So impossible the library doesn't try, doesn't even attempt. We can keep pain, misery, hurt, and all the other terrible things for a millennium, but shame seems to slip away. Too personal to really be held onto once the leaseholder passes.

    No, your shame isn’t for the curious undergrad looking to finish a research project. Your shame isn't for the archivists. Your shame isn't for the administrators, or those poor souls you will share a box with if you are lucky enough to sneak in. No, your shame is for you, and it will die with you.

    So, won’t you become immortal? Come live forever on the second floor, eternally shameless. You may be remembered through your misery, through your drama, but at the very least you will be free of the prison you call a mind. One may ask if it can truly be called immortality then? It certainly won't be you in those boxes. Everything that you define as yourself will be lost along with your body as the earth slowly takes it back. The only real thing the dedicated Boise State Archivists are keeping forever is your reflection. Everything bright enough to reflect in time’s dull mirror that is.

    But if that still seems like a good deal to you, you are welcome to try. I wish you luck in your quest for immortality. Maybe you will find something more sure than the archives before you're gone, lord knows that’s what most humans spend their entire lives looking for. If you want a place where your misery can be used to keep you alive in the minds of scholars for centuries, here you are. Just remember it won't really be you.

    Humans are animals that make leashes for themselves, and we walk ourselves at all points of the day. The moments after our deaths are the only ones where others can see us reflected free of our leash. The leash will be forgotten first, hell it’ll be forgotten before your body goes cold. It’ll be forgotten before the worms get their chance at you.

    Perhaps that’s all we can ask for. An afterlife free of shame remembered for eternity from unlabeled boxes of misery in the Boise State Special Collections and Archive.

    You wanna be immortal?

William Carney

Boise State University, Boise ID

January 2024

*Tracy, Paul "Everything Eats but the Man", Sketch on Cardstock, 1912, Boise State University Special Archives