I'm in the middle of the Presidential Forum, "Lives and Archives: Finding, Framing, and Circulating Narrated Lives Now." Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer have just co-delivered a fine account of Ella, a young woman who fled from Europe to Bolivia in the face of the rising Nazi threat. The archive that she has left behind--photographs, some letters, a few journal pages--carries with it, in Spitzer's words, "dust," read here not simply as patina and symptoms of age but also vulnerability, the fragility of a life.
Dust also seems to fill the gaps that the archive necessarily produces, the fact that it is always incomplete. Those gaps prompt a reading for, as Hirsch puts it, resonance and dissonance, the necessarily conflicted response to a catastrophic situation.
Nancy Miller, in the second paper of the panel, notes that entering an archive always includes the sense of missing someone or something. That haunting seems to me to be connected to dust and resonance. We'll see how these concepts evolves as the panel continues.
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