About this Book

I imagine the community whose tender hands sorted and assembled these materials, and then gently enclosed them in folders and safe boxes. My engagement [?] is now too a part of that performance of love, a part of ageless rituals of love and respect, in this secular space which nevertheless reveals in its silence a temple-like aspect. I am become a priest of love."00'Lamentation' is a reverie on loss and despair in face of the possibility of extinction. It begins in the archive, examining the legacy of artist film-maker Stuart Croft whose life and work was cut short unexpectedly. Reflections on the death of Chantal Akerman follow. Thoughts gather around the idea of distance, and the poetic image of the distant beloved. Archival records are relics and the work of the researcher is akin to that of the archaeologist. Yet to remember well necessitates forgetting, since not everything can be held in mind, and narratives that explain the past are necessarily an artifice of the present. Rock strata and fossils are archives of sorts, and extinction is akin to the loss of knowledge. 'Lamentation' is a contemplation of finality and death, of annihilation, and of the coming confinement of all that we are into the fossil record.