REMAINS TO BE SEWN is an atlas for the elusive—evidence that the most important questions refuse to explain themselves.
Field Catalogue Entry:
[PERSONAL DOCUMENTS. Entry Code: Etymo-001]
Filed under: The Drawer Before the First Drawer
I didn't set out to make an archive. It happened the way dust gathers in dark corners. Quietly. Out of habit. Out of devotion for wordless things and the questions they pose.
It began with spiral notebooks filled with thoughts and doodles I compulsively jot down while reading someone else's words. An empty ink jar too beautiful to throw away. A sentence that changes meaning when I read it again years later.
Now my drawers won't close. Each filing leans toward another, as if chattering across time recognizing their kinship.
When I was twelve, I read Hesse.1 In his world, a strange birthmark changed how I looked at life. Now, in my work, blue thread has become just that. A childhood button2 finds its home in a broken typewriter, and missing letters say more than the most eloquent words. I had made note of them all, even before I knew what to make of them. I made them mine. Not as trophies, but because most days it's easier to listen to things than people.
I am an ekphrastic3 creature. Always one layer removed from the source4, translating what I see into something others might wonder at too. Words can be so unreliable, but their mystery is most of their beauty.
The Gathering Principle
But archives, like people, are only as interesting as the connections they make.
So there's a point to me sharing all of this: to find others. Fellow collectors drawn to literary ghosts5 that embrace the mysteries that hide in plain sight, waiting for the right quality of attention to show their shadows.
The ones who know that building a collection means building a life.6 Each piece a little crooked, a little charged. Described as precisely as one might explain the logic of a dream. Like how some stories demand their own archaeology: a way of noticing that has yet to be invented.
This archive serves as both companion and precursor to the stories I want to tell. My collection of scraps, inspirations, and paratexts.7 An altar to the books that didn't end when I closed them. The ones I devoured with a tinge of envy, wishing I'd written, because they wrote me back.
I owe to this assortment my most fervent belief: a book's first line is nothing short of alchemy. The best of them make the rest of the story feel inevitable, even unnecessary. They prime us for the adventure to come. A proem, it was once called, now a forgotten word.
Etymological Sisters
Proem, not Poem.
From the Greek προοίμιον, not ποίημα.
The sigh before a song, not a song that makes you sigh.
The tuning of strings, not the stringed concerto.
The light at the horizon, not the blue that lies beyond it.
The thread meeting the eyelet, not yet mending with the needle.
The invocation, not the invoked.
Doublets, they call them.
One marks the journey's beginning, one journeys to its mark.
One summons the muse. One transcribes her silence.
One opens the door. One waltzes through.
Sisters, forever intertwined, like memory and story.
Like this collection, and me, and you.
Women have always been history's first lines. Creating the conditions that make everything else manifest, then stepping back so gracefully we might forget they were ever there. Sometimes by choice, most times by lack thereof.
The Archivist
I keep collecting their remains. The forgotten proems8 that made the celebrated poetry possible. The breadcrumbs swept under the rug by those who hoped no one would notice9. The women’s lives that faded into the background. Not through dramatic destruction, although that too, but through the quiet violence of being redacted.
My job here is simple: to hold doorways open with my whole grammar, ensuring safe passage for both sisters. I want to tell Poem not to forget Proem when she rushes through the curtains to hear the applause. So I’ve taken it upon myself to be the one who remembers to write it all down. Not as a facsimile, but to grant them both their flowers. A new chance to reunite.
I cannot, in good faith, be merely a keeper of poems, but guardian of proems.
If Ocean Vuong wrote: "I have spent my life slowly cataloguing the ways we come undone," then perhaps it's time someone attempted to stitch them back together. Quietly, gracefully. Like all the women before me who refused to disappear into the margins of history.
If you recognize that the most important collections aren't housed in museums10, but in the memory11 chambers of our souls—in the little notes we've left to ourselves so we don't forget the lines that ignite us—then you are who I'm seeking.
Welcome home. My only question is:
What remains to be sewn in your own life?
Aniella,
Chief Archivist, Guardian of Proems, Woman.
Loose Threads
Orphaned curiosities, and other journeys for Daring Travelers: — follow them at your own peril.
Demian found me suffocating in a Catholic school uniform, drowning under the certainty of what girls were supposed to become. Hesse's protagonist gave me permission to question the rules others had written for me, and planted the seed that in a world of predetermined roles, rebellion is nothing short of sacred.
Ekphrasis /ˈekfrəsəs/ (noun): a museum of words, profoundly ambivalent.
Another voice specimen that strayed from the resonance filing cabinet, but found its home here.
A poet's grimoire scattered in margins that correspond to the history of the occult.
Paratexts /ˈpærəteksts/ (noun): mediators between book, author, and reader. Like this footnote you're reading now.
A cabinet of forgotten voices in 101 compartments – each one rebelling against history's redaction.
What readers left behind – letters, flowers, locks of hair pressed between forgotten pages. What gets preserved, what gets erased, and who decides?
A museum that curates mystery itself, where "a man's mind could attain a mood of aloofness above everyday affairs."
A scholar's obsessive attempt to map the 'afterlife of antiquity.'