This week I am in London (Ontario – which I did not expect to lean quite so hard into the whole London but Canada thing) at the Canadian Library Assessment Workshop, a conference I have previously enjoyed and found very useful. This year, I am finding it…unnecessary, a description I could expand on, except that I’d rather shift this post to more interesting musings.
It’s becoming increasingly clear (to myself) not only that I am intellectually bored with my job but that this boredom is increasingly bubbling out in varying degrees of weirdness that I’m sure are visible to others. The reason I made the trek to CLAW this week is to give a workshop on process mapping, which is useful in practice but dreadfully boring to explain. My slides were due a couple of weeks ago, so I put together a milquetoast workshop and sent it off. The problem started when I set up a lunch date with a former STU professor, and in my head I kept picturing her asking me what I was there for, and (again, in my head) I kept having a fair amount of trouble justifying this topic, and what I finally landed on was: I won’t get promoted if I do anything too interesting. And I cannot find the lie.
Is process mapping interesting? I admit that there is a kernel of interest to me, but I had not heretofore examined why that should be. Unearthing interest in what I already do would of course be infinitely better, or at least more convenient, than attempting to forge into something new. Fortunately, the book I happened to bring for the plane was William Egginton’s The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the ultimate nature of reality. The book engages in an interdisciplinary discussion of reality, the self, perception, and uncertainty; and in the introduction I encountered the following quote from Borges:
“We (the undivided divinity operating within us) have dreamt the world. We have dreamt it as firm, mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space and durable in time; but in its architecture we have allowed tenuous and eternal crevices of unreason which tell us it is false.”
Borges, cited in Egginton
Therein lies much of the interest in both process mapping particularly and libraries as an intellectual project. We have spent our days maintaining (and at one time – I fear passed – developing) structures to describe reality and are the first to be shocked when these are developed or executed imperfectly. Our processes are the world that we dream, but they refuse to emerge consistently in practice. Egginton argues that “minimal forgetting” is conditional to the formation of the self and therefore no one person can access the truth. Process mapping as a collectively-formed representation, exposes these cracks, whether or not we admit they exist.
The importance of a figure like Heisenberg in this conversation is that the act of observing reality changes it. We make choices about what aspects we wish to observe and in doing so change the future (Heisenberg’s entire premise is of course predicated on the quantam world playing by different rules, but neither Kant or Borges would of course be proscriptive to that domain). Libraries are inclined to “make idols out of our tools,” and need benefit from an overly healthy dose of unreality.
So, in the words of Borges, “Let us admit what all idealists admit: the hallucinatory nature of the world. Let us do what no idealist has done: seek unrealities that confirm that nature.”