Field/notes: A Start in Richmond

A Return to Devising Commons

A Start:

Psychic desires discovered and met on Barnes Common raises this sense of proportion – now a speculative muddle involving Virginia Woolf’s position on Mill Hill, corroborated by archival and literary research deep in images and ephemera of ‘originals’  – images of the diaries of Virginia Woolf and 18th-century lawbooks perused in a silent room at the British Library, some digitally archived and retrieved on Google Books from a desk in a basement office in Roehampton.

On Christmas Eve 2022 I went for a long walk on the Thames path, stopping at a bookshop in Kew and picked up a copy of Selected Short Storys¹Woolf, V. (2019) Virginia Woolf Selected Short Stories. Edited by S. Kemp. UK: Penguin Classics.. I wanted to read something casual but related to the thesis at a cafe in Richmond. Symmetry and significance matter in the thesis. Knowing I would be down the road from the Woolfs’ Paradise Road home (Hogarth House) I was looking for something related. It is in this collection I read several references to Barnes and the Richmond area (Solid Objects, Kew Gardens, Mark on the Wall, Street Haunting). Later, to test the experiment again, I read Solid Objects from the first edition of A Haunted House to read it in place, somewhere in Barnes Common – the intention is to keep moving through the archive at the intersection between place and ‘original’ document. I refer to the edition frequently, keeping the reference to Barnes Common in my visual field in an attempt to coordinate the page to the furze bush in question. How does the tactility and atmosphere of place shift in each circumstance and what keeps coming up: what is overlooked? The sector of something ‘solid’ remains elusive, yet the desire to ‘touch’ remains. I take a photo to honor the moment, unsure whether it will be useful later. I take notes of questions and thoughts, the most notable being that by undertaking this activity on Christmas eve, of all days, I am left with a settling sense of symmetry – the reading was not just for myself, there is a type of honoring of the specificity of place and time – what shelters the experience of encountering the archive, and what does this reflection, itself, shelter?

This is a haunting of personal connection and interpreted meaning – this is the (psychic) domicile of archives Derrida refers to in Archive Fever: “The archive shelters in itself, this memory of the name arkh?. But it also shelters itself from this memory which it shelters: which comes down to saying also that it forgets it … a science of the archive must include the theory of this institutionalization … a bundle of limits which have a history²(Jacques Derrida and Eric Prenowitz, ‘Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression’, Diacritics 25, no. 2 (1995): 9–63.or more on the archive as house).”The limits Derrida refers to, contextualised by psychoanalysis, could be extended into how we interact with the archive. Derrida explores how institutionalisation limits our interactions and, therefore, knowledge gathered in and with the archive. Moving forward with that prospectus, I turn back on the self, thinking about how the interaction with the archive (and those encountered on the way), reflect on the psychic needs we reach for in the content. we learn about ourselves when we engage with the archive.

While pilfering through archive boxes in a stuffy room at the Local Studies Room at the Richmond Public Library I discovered, after the fact, the archivist handed me the Richmond Library archives of the Barnes and Mortlake Historical Society (BMHS) archives instead of the BMHS originals: the library collection was smaller and less daunting than the BMHS. When constructing a history, it is acceptable to depend on the archivist as providing the most relevant of the originals needed to complete the research and work. Later, while having lunch in the ‘Riverside Room’ on the floor below the archives, I realise I am looking directly over the new Virignia Woolf statue on the riverside terrace. It may not be relevant but in the archival research I am conducting here is as much about the interactions as it is about the content. What is overlooked is the institutionalisation of information – providing copies is acceptable under the auspices of protecting the originals. The archivists have had limited interactions with the originals – so I write to the secret of the BMHS to ask about their relationship to Barnes and the originals. From them, I learned their connection relies on a personal relationship to (this) place. When speaking about the archives themselves, they are quite keen to speak of the hard work involved in collecting and cataloguing all the content over the years, who was involved, and where it came from. Their interest is in the people and process of memory and sources – their interest in Barnes and Mortlake is as much about the collectors and archivists as it is about the history itself. It is about the practice of researching, preserving, and telling history.

What am I, personally, observing: I bring a lifetime of knowledge of and about my subjects that influences how I go about digging around. As guide and devisor of the walk, I cross-reference what is recalled via multiple sources, three separate editions on occasion and several scholarly analyses to verify a fair and balanced argument. To hold myself accountable to the source and the reader. I check the visual composition of each specific page in the context of where it was discovered, where it was composed, where it will be copied, and where it will be found. I do this because the Others interested in the history seem to care about this as well but do not prioritise it as what ‘matters’ most. Mrs. Woolf instructs to look closely at the ordinary, Barnes, Richmond, and Surrey are proximate to these conversations about closely looking – so it is this practice that must be observed. What are we looking for, and what are we overlooking on a sub/urban common?