This Annihilating Force

An archive is just a placeholder for nothing, but needless to say, nothing isn’t only nothing (meaning nothing is only nothing). Pennies, for example, are worth nothing, and all the same, they add up: a hundred pennies are a dollar, a hundred dollars are a hundred dollars (which is not the same as what a hundred dollars are, that’s the whole point), and as for a hundred hundred dollars – well, you can do that math yourself. To be fair, none of those pennies or dollars is worth anything unless you already believe in a totally invented, yet widely accepted definition of value; but at the same time, nothing weighs nothing but still carries the weight of the container by which it is carried, and in this case, no such leap of faith is required.
    A headstone, by the way, is an archive.
    A husk, an archive.
    To some extent, perhaps – and depending on the condition of the entrails and the pelt – a carcass stumbled across in winter woods may also be an archive.
    A memory, one might say, is the archetype of an archive, but it is also not an archive at all, for whatever is extracted from it is put back in changed, even if only by the fact of its having now been extracted where before it had not.
    And yes, this text is an archive – though of what we still cannot say, but only see – there, in the distance, where beyond all staging, the trail disappears into the trees.