Day 4

I have acquired one new piece of photo identification every day I've been here so far, and need to get at least one more. I left with three pieces of photo ID (passport, driver's license, student ID card) and I now have four more, a 133% increase: a card to get into my hall, an additional student ID card, a library card and a reader's pass for the British Library. The student oystercard (for discounted bus and underground rides) should be coming in the post next week.

After I got my card I walked around in the exhibition hall that houses the "treasures of the British Library." (Sadly, an exhibt on the Ramanyana has just recently closed, and the special exhibits gallery is currently in transition.) It was an interesting and in many ways disquieting experience to encounter, say, the Beowulf manuscript in (quite literally) the flesh and have it seem, as a static object open to a particular page, both less real and yet more reified than the various facsimilies and printed editions of that book that I've handled. Conversely, it was strange to encounter facsimilies of the Linsfrane Gospels in both electronic and codex form, while the manuscript itself was conspicuously absent, temporarily removed from view for conservation. The presence of two facisimilies surprised me, since isn't the whole point of such a treasury to house the irreplaceable, the rare, the unique? It's as though the import of the Gospels, and by extension, much of the exhibit as a whole (certainly the illuminated manuscript portion, which occupies maybe half the space), lies not in its textuality or even its materiality, but rather in aesthetics that are both tied to and very much mobile vis-a-vis the physical object. This last point is amply demonstrated by a visit to the gift shop one enters immediately upon leaving the exhibit. One of the things I've been struggling with as I start my disseration is the sixteenth century antiquarian's desire to monumentalize after the dissolution of the monasteries, to say that we have (or had) this, to articulate the past in order that it can be superceded. I'm not sure whether pulling out Frued or Kapital would give me the best theoretical framework with which to work through these issues, but from a practical perspective, I think that working in the BL will give me plenty of material (in every sense of the term) with which to work through that particular crux.

On another note, in some ways I find the existence of things like the British Museum and the British Library more remarkable than that of the objects they hold. However inappropriately, I cling to some notion of a kind of genius or inspiration that lies behind great works of art and literature, whereas the creation and maintainance of collections seems to require planning and foresight that is all the more moving to me because its an impulse that is familiar. "Genius" (however you want to define it) is so different from my own experience of being-in-the-world so as to create a sort of distance between me as viewer/reader and the work, while the innate familiarity of the actions of getting and organizing that go into any good collection make things like libraries and museums that much more impressive to me.