Total Biological Archive

(Neat, clipped handwriting. No loops)

The total biological archive was set up in the Spring of 1973, on the outskirts of the West Berkshire village of Gloswich. Its creators have since faded into the kind of obscurity only wilful expulsion from the common psyche can explain. Society ejected them with a force spasmodic, a total and instant repulsion from the mass. However, since finding them–and of course I have found them, for my masters and their unique interests have granted me unprecedented access to all kinds of hidden places–they have been most helpful in piecing together the events that led up to the founding of the archive and the subsequent corruption of its original mission. The rest, as they say, is history.

I should hasten to add that the totality of the archive thankfully never came to pass, limited as it was to a few shared basement spaces and, later, through methods subterranean, the Gloswich village hall. However, the architects of the scheme were convinced otherwise during my discussions with them in those state-run nursing homes. That it somehow leaked, infiltrating things much larger than itself in the manner of a brainless fluke or amoeba. (Here’s a trick for you – find the most demented guest you can in those stinking halls, and then, after lights out, lean in very close to their sleeping faces and listen to the whistle of air between their cracked lips. It can tell you all kinds of secrets.)

Despite their best efforts, the small sample size for both collecting and disseminating the data was not overcome in time. Of that I am certain.

(Change in paper, from cotton rag, lined, to wood-based, unlined)

They started small. A pilot, as it were. Believing the contemporary model of biological data-gathering to be hopelessly short-sighted, they expected funding to be sparse until they could credibly challenge the consensus of the day. Doctor Albert Nash and his mentor R. T. Brech were the drivers of the project, roping in a variety of anthropologists, biologists, psychologists, surgeons and haruspexes for their tasks. Such true believers were keen to engage with the work in hand but not particularly enthused about the storage and preservation of the data. As a result, records are patchy and within a few decades will be consigned to the dust entirely. What does remain as of now are the vestiges of what must have been a trove of information on the citizens of Gloswich. Every single aspect of their forms and materials was taken apart and reassembled and finally analysed to ascertain a true baseline of human experience, extracted via technological marvels not seen before or since. Indeed, it appears before the collapse of the team plans were made for a ‘biological touchstone’ to be displayed at a science fair in London’s Olympia. If my assumptions are correct, we are all very lucky that this plan was not fully realised.

In addition to technological innovation, Nash’s team operated on the furthest reaches of their respective fields, often in realms long since excluded from mainstream discourse. Borrowing heavily from evolutionary biology, phrenology, animal magnetism and some unique takes on Freudian psychoanalysis, their methods increasingly came to resemble conjurations or divinations, the battery of tests performed on their subjects akin to stages in a ritual. One such subject, a young man with the last name of Taylor, declared that he ‘did not enjoy the procedure at all’ and that, on the subject of compensation, ‘no money would be enough’. He later attempted to involve the police, although they were unable to locate anything corresponding to a recognised criminal act in his statements.

Ironically, most of the data available to us now seem to feature this gentleman heavily, especially ‘Bodily Insight #5’ and ‘Insanity of tissue #3’. The central conceit of this series – that any person could see fit to experience exactly how another lived, heartbeats, brain-waves, muscle cramps and all – did not appeal to humble folk such as Taylor. Unsurprisingly, they considered it a strange form of devilry visited upon them by a psychopath and his toadys. Enough villagers were agitated by the testimony of Taylor and others to culminate in the eventual destruction of the test chambers in the village hall and later, the abandonment of the greater site. Regarding these crucial few days records are essentially lacking, due to a host of factors. Deeply repressed memories are all I have to go off for primary sources. Several statements support the theory that whatever containment procedures separating the technicians from their subjects failed and the whole scene, I quote, ‘sunk into a fleshy nihilism’. Thus, their first set of subjects, consisting of the entire population of the village, also happened to be their last.

(Change in tool, from blue ink to green. Additional pressure applied on Ts and Os.)

The motivations powering such an esoteric and spiritually polluting project were as varied as its participants. Clearly there was a sense that their research could materialise possibilities formerly unseen and open new corridors of perception along the long-dormant leylines of the human nervous system. Their unfortunate hosts disagreed, as noted in ‘Perception test #17’.

Beyond that shared purpose, matters grow murkier. Some were sadists. Some were mad, or pretending to be so. Others yet hoped to isolate some essential essence of humanity in their studies, to bridge the gap that exists between friends, family, community, an insurmountable gap of flesh and blood and dark bundles of nerves. Even the closest of lovers could not envision what it would be like to truly be another, despite some charlatans and healers claiming such a state was possible through empathy, transcendental meditation et al.

Ironic in only the way observed reality can convincingly muster, an other is exactly what they created, one that shared a body and mind in the same tight space as the subject.

(Scratched into back of tile. Clay composite, possibly fragment of a larger fresco.)

The existence of this foreign body, in the truest sense of the phrase, is mentioned only in notes penned by Nash in his scant personal effects, suggesting a deeper layer of research that most weren’t privy to. Conspiracies within conspiracies…

(Return to cotton rag paper. 2B pencil. Marks suggestive of frantic erasure.)

Even as I sift through the data some residual scraps cling to my memories, necessitating a scrubbing in the near future. I must savour such rarefied information while I can, down to the narrowest of details – records of fingernail growth, grainy photographs of clumped hair taken exactly 7 seconds apart for hours, a dried obstruction, a palimpsest of unresolved questions. What exactly was this other they created? Why does it now exist nowhere but own mind, having jumped to me from the blank pages like a flea? It matters not. The contents, the good men and women of Gloswich, now boiled down into crosses and arcs on graphs, once heralded the future of data collection, yet remained trapped within it like flies in amber. These works have percolated, somehow, throughout our history, only signified by their negation and escape, a bubble bursting from blackest tar, a breach of ethics scrubbed from memory, a shutdown of a department nobody knew existed. Disappearing professors and redacted research. Oh yes.

(Writing begins to feature leftward slant, suggestive of haste, a crabbed hand. Paper partially burnt.)

Evidence of other total biological archives is lacking. Those senile monsters I interrogated claim otherwise. Both of these points are true. Other archives exist that neither I nor they are aware of, having grown seemingly of their own accord. My pet theory is that the destruction of the original archive was nothing of the sort. Rather, it was a kind of birth or metastasization. By splitting apart, hiding its true form under the guise of annihilation, it becomes free to seed and blossom in several places at once.

(Written on the inside of a cereal box. Rice Treats. Two free tickets to any theme park section cut out.)

Aha! A new note, further evidence discovered at the tip of my pen. Albert Nash writes of a twin experiment and an eventual widening of scope, of voluntary collection. Brech writes underneath the only line attributable to him – ‘Potential. Gatherer and listener? Everywhere at once’. My masters wish me to explore this possibility at a later date, although to me it is clear that this is the end of my contract.

Let me explain. It is clear that my benefactors seek to use this information to control, to punish. I merely wish it to be free.

(Written on several receipts, located in █ █ █ █ █, █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ and █ █ █ █ █ █ █ █ respectively.)

Having spent a great deal of my life tracking down this neglected archive, I have learnt how to handle and manipulate this data like no one else alive, perhaps not even those withered technicians. My method is crude but effective, my tools merely a chewed-up ballpoint and a few scraps of whatever can take the ink. To begin, I create an internal frame within my mind’s eye and draw the images into it, a movement much like pulling skin off boiled milk. I then represent it in words and occasional charts. Simple, easy to transport, and totally innocuous. My findings I deposit as and when I get the chance, on train seats or park benches. Consider this to be a way of viewing even one tiny part of the immense totality of the archive, which collapsed under its own weight before it had even truly begun. Universality was the goal, but the claim, the very notion, has burst whatever membrane separated the archive from the point of extraction. The vitality of the data, growing ripe and heavy. Such a vast repository, within each and every one of us, growing and swelling larger and larger. Our faces fill with tumours, unrecognisable.