ephemera

dispatch 39

Mar 15, 2023

hello all,

I’m writing from the dark at nearly 7am this morning. I never feel Daylight Savings Time until I lose my morning light, but here we are, and I’m trying to find my footing in it. I watch the lights come on in the neighbor’s house across the street, and all of the snow has that disappeared in the rain is back again. It’s beautiful and it’s bleak and it’s March. We’re almost there.

Today’s newsletter is about what we keep and what we throw away and queer legacies. Its the first pass at an idea I’ve been thinking about for a long time!

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A faded photo of a carnival funhouse next to a portable ticket booth. The booth is white with pink and blue trim and says "Tickets". Behind both is a blue sky. — All carnival content is creepy, but not all creepy content is carnival

ephemera

Ephemera, by definition, means “something of no lasting significance.” It comes from the Greek word ephēmeros meaning, “living only a day”, adapted in the 17th century to refer primarily to paper throwaways; items that were not meant to hold long-term interest. But ephēmeros, in its original use as an adjective, referred to a plant or insect with a one-day lifespan or period of blooming. The word holds all of the gravity of an implied death, an end, and a memory. For an object, there is a life that can be obtained in attention and devotion, and a death that comes with lack of notice.

Among my queer ancestors there are fervent archivists. They keep and they catalog the pins, the zines, the correspondence, the pictures, and the footage. They keep these things with the fierce surety that someone will want them, and that they are important enough to continue to exist long past their intended use. They keep them for us, they keep them for themselves. They keep them because a collective memory can be a map to futures we have not found yet. These archives exist in staunch defiance of the idea of the ephemeral, helping us to stay in a world that would prefer that we disappear. In lieu of the pale confines of biology we shape our own legacies.

This essay is about ephemera. Not keepsakes, ephemera. The keepsake is that realm of conventional value, passed through generations to reach us before we too must pass them on. These things have a place, but I am more interested in their strange cousins. That crumpled receipt from the bookstore that you still use as a bookmark, the flier from the show with push pin holes at the corners, the box of birthday cards you’ve kept for years because to throw away someone’s handwriting seems morbid. Tell me the story of that scrap of fabric, the pin you chose for your backpack, the faded ticket stubs from the time before cell phone QR code scanning. Let me read the first zine you ever bought or the liner notes from a long-discarded cassette tape that you keep because it has that song on it and you can’t let it go. Tell me what you keep. If it means something to you then that is enough.

Queer time theory tells us that our ideas about time as a linear, measurable thing are just one possibility among many. Like all of the kaleidoscopic fragments of queerness it flows around both barrier and boundary, winking at containment. Time bends, breaks, stretches, and shifts. Things can be fleetingly eternal and forever impermanent. The traditional idea of the ephemeral as an item with no lasting significance, only works within a very specific and traditional framing and understanding of time, in which our lives outlast the things that adorn them. When we make our lives the eternity against which these things do not matter and we forget for one moment that we are so damn fleeting.

I keep a box under my bed that is full of old papers, my own collection of ephemera. The ink is smudged and faded, with deep folds where the paper has turned almost mossy with repeat use; the photographs are old and they stick together until I pull them apart carefully, bracing against that horrible ripping sound. These humble things hold the truest stories I know. Of the perfect day contained in this one tangible reminder, the value that can be poured into something so simple just because it comes from that day when I first held your hand, saw that film, made it to the art show that ripped me apart. Each thing holds a story, a revisiting, a reckoning, an attempt to paint the sky with a past I’m never quite done unpacking. Memory, like digging up the bones in the garden.

I have affection for throwaway things, and the way that they are made important by the act of being kept, in the way that I too yearn to be kept. Because to keep something and declare it not disposable can be a radical act in a disposable world. Sometimes, to affirm our things as worthy of saving is to save ourselves.

We are all ephemeral, depending on our idea of a timeline. And we are all eternal in the way that a ticket stub found in a drawer can hold all of the textures of memory long beyond the moment when its utility has run out. They will not build monuments to us, but in our own ways we forge our own. Queer history is what we make it. It is in every item we save, and every reason we save it. Where families and lineage and memory take different shapes, we construct our own stories. I cannot imagine more precious work than that.

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