Half-way through the Mulberry Bush's self-imposed rush to close MB3 and the Archive and Special Collections, almost exactly midway between mid-October 2025 and May 31st 2026, on my birthday, I was diagnosed with Myeloma, a marrow plasma blood cell cancer which begins to disassemble your bones if not treated quickly and well, among other unpleasant things; and it seemed fitting to be being disassembled internally as a body while a thing I helped to create and sustain over 30 years was being aggressively disassembled externally, disassembling my life, disassembling so many others' lives and memories, and disassembling the rich assembled fabric of connections and networks which make living systems live and growing phenomena. I am writing this as the United States and Israel pursue war against Iran and in the Middle East, and it is as if a deathwish is everywhere abroad in the land.
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When I began this "book" I let the folks at the Mulberry Bush know, to ease my conscience and give a space where they could read and respond to any observations and criticisms, or indeed understandings and praise which might turn up here. It began all quite unknown and chaotic, as journeys you've never taken are, when there is no clear destination. Letting them know was a matter of honour, which I understand of myself is rooted in family, and in being a Westerner, in being from a West settled by great grandparents and grandparents, and homesteaded in a part of Arizona where my mother grew up miles from schools and towns, but with music, and wells they'd drilled, and time to help and be helped by others. And it is rooted in my father, an officer in the American Air Force who was killed on active service out of Japan during the Cold War.
I mention this in part because honour is a basic principle, in which one's service to others includes learning what one can from everyone and everything, which includes learning about how small one's understanding is, which also includes laying out one's evidence for what one says and writes, with the intention that it can be corrected and critiqued, illuminated and taken elsewhere through better and fuller evidence. Living with "disturbed" children as they were once called is an immersion in this; and if one can bear it, and bear the social consequences, that intense kind of observation and honesty is worth years of "therapeutic living", in which it is not just the children who are transformed, and in whom the storms are lived and resolved. And it is this principle which underlies this book, and the stories and arguments it makes. It is the basis for sharing memories, adducing the evidence of contemporary documents and publications, aka archives; the purpose is change; and who is changed, engaged honourably, is everyone. None of us is an island, complete and unto ourselves. None of us is complete. None of us is complete without others, whoever they are, and how painful that can be.
And, of course, joyous. The privilege of having been an archivist, for such a field of people.
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What is being lost is unfathomable. A system of tightly intertwined experiences of living with and for others for a special and specialised purpose: hundreds, and indeed, thousands of lifetimes in archives and oral histories and publications in a living ecosystem with the present, torn away from one another and de-contextualised. The violence of that, and the violence of the process for all concerned, is appalling; one cannot think that anyone raised up in a therapeutic setting, as all of us have been who have been within them as adults or children, living within or working within, could voluntarily set such a thing in motion. And yet.
And how?
I can see that this is not so much a well-argued Foreword as a series of Wittgensteinian propositions.
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