Ways of thinking about archivists' notes, number one:
There's a passage in Gabriel Garcia Marquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude that colors my thinking about notes, and it's the plague of amnesia. First the people forget the names for things, so those who still remember write the names of things on all the things. But then the names' significations are lost -- "This says 'cow,' but what is a 'cow?'" -- so the few who still remember anything have to write longer, explanatory texts: "This is the cow. Milk her twice daily to receive milk and cream." And then everybody forgets everything. Sooner or later the plague passes, and it's been 20 years since I read this book, so forgive me if I've lost something here, but I think the people more or less forget that they had amnesia, and return to ordinary life.
There are some hippy-dippy epistemological questions which I'm going to sidestep -- In which realms of human endeavor does the argument-from-authority carry the greatest weight? Is this a deficiency in the humanities, or a strength? -- and I guess even hippier-dippier ontological problems -- Isn't a baseball's innate nature, to be thrown, obvious? Can you forget how to use a baseball? -- in favor of other stuff.
Archivists familiar with the story will want to identify with the not-yet amnesiacs. "Ha! A scope-and-content note for a cow!" we'd say. We're the vestal virgins keeping the flame of the oracle.
But we're much more like the poor ordinary villagers who see a demolition derby going on inside their heads and frantically reach out for any shred of shared knowledge before it all turns to scrap and dust. We know we're going to lose it before we can fully secure this stuff, so our notes route archival collections to our successors.
Our notes don't therefore mean anything in an ordinary sense: it's not clear, in fact it's crazily unlikely that I will know what I meant by an old note; it's insane to think anyone else would. They are more like precursor-redactions, big opaque black signs saying I ALREADY KNOW THAT I AM FORGETTING THIS
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