Lost Children Archive

Conversations, in a family, become linguistic archaeology. They build the world we share, layer it in a palimpsest, give meaning to our present and future.

I put the book back in its box and open Box I, digging around inside it carefully. I take out a brown notebook, on the first page of which my husband has written “On Collecting.” I jump to a random page and read a note: “Collecting is a form of fruitful procrastination, of inactivity pregnant with possibility.” A few lines down there’s a quote copied from a book by Marina Tsvetaeva: “Genius: the highest degree of being mentally pulled to pieces, and the highest of being—collected.”

In my husband’s Box II, under some notebooks, there’s a book titled The Soundscape, by R. Murray Schafer. I remember reading it many years ago and understanding only a meager portion of it but understanding at least that it was a titanic effort, possibly in vain, to organize the surplus of sound that human presence in the world had created. By separating and cataloging sounds, Schafer was trying to get rid of noise. Now I flip through the pages—full of difficult graphs, symbolic notations of different types of sounds, and a vast inventory that catalogs the sounds of what Schafer referred to as the World Soundscape Project. The inventory ranges from “Sounds of Water” and “Sounds of Seasons,” to “Sounds of the Body” and “Domestic Sounds,” to “Internal Combustion Engines,” “Instruments of War and Destruction,” and “Sounds of Time.” Under each of these categories, there is a list of particulars. For example, under “Sounds of the Body” there is: heartbeat, breathing, footsteps, hands (clapping, scratching, etc.), eating, drinking, evacuating, lovemaking, nervous system, dream sounds. At the very end of the inventory is the category “Sound Indicators of Future Occurrences.” But, of course, there are no particulars listed under it.

never stopping because if they stop, they will die, this they know, this they’ve been told, if someone stops in the deadlands, they never come out, like that boy among them

I remembered a joke or a saying Pa had told us where someone says, you can piss on my face, just don’t tell me it’s raining

Term: Our Peculiar Institution. Meaning: slavery. (Epitome of all euphemisms.)
Term: Removal. Meaning: expulsion and dispossession of people from their lands.

Against a euphemism, remembrance. In order to not repeat.
Remember terms and meanings. Their absurd disjointedness.

Euphemisms lead us to tolerate the unacceptable. And, eventually, to forget.

Euphemisms hide, erase, coat.

The Children’s Crusade, Marcel Schwob