Biologies
If you plot the completion of my letters on the spectrum of a children’s “Hot & Cold” game, my post for this month was a toasted marshmallow, with lots of original research carbonizing in the glow. And then the coals of the campfire went dark.
So I’m saving that story for another month, and I switched today to an idea that’s been in the back of my mind for a while. In always considering what we might exclude from the common conception of “archives” — old, dusty, inert — I frequently return to whatever is living.
Or least has lived. Ghosts and shades are incredible teachers in biological archives.
The easy example is the collection of preserved birds or insects in any natural history museum, with the next most obvious example being ourselves and other humans.
Our bones hold all kinds of information about our lives. Researchers are also now able to extract proteins from archival documents to learn more about their owners.
The familiar natural logbooks of tree rings and cores from ice or seafloor sediments provide year-by-year records of life on Earth. But so do corals, stalagmites in caves, and the earwax of whales.
Even more stunning, scientists have actually mapped a woolly mammoth’s entire lifetime of travels based on information locked in a tusk. I’m still in awe that details this granular are possible!
Biological archives also can flip the archival process backward, from the bookshelf into nature. Words turn into wine when a reference book provides forgotten lessons that help revive historical American grape varietals.
And though scents evoke the most powerful memories, odor is ethereal, a tough task for any archive. But a few projects are trying.
I think I’ve used this before, but I want to share again the poem etched on the Europa Clipper, a spacecraft that officially launched two weeks ago toward Jupiter’s moon.
“And it is not darkness that unites us, / [but] each rivulet, each pulse, each vein.”
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This newsletter was written on the traditional lands of the Piscataway and Nacotchtank.