A history student is tasked with sorting through an abandoned asylum's archives. The asylum is rumored to be haunted, but Lena dismisses this as merely town folklore. When her research brings her to venture inside the asylum's walls, however, the fr...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
"Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto. I am human, and I think nothing human is alien to me." - Terence
-
History is not only in the passage of time, in the linear series of its events; it is also in the shifting of mindsets running like a soft current behind them.
We know what explicitly happened in time but there is an entirely different type of archaeology we must perform - in behind the lines - to dig back into the lenses underpinning them. Likewise we can imagine the future in the tangible - the machines, the inventions we will someday have - but we cannot yet imagine how we will someday think. What will we think is right, what will we think is wrong? Will future generations someday question us - damn us under their tongues - for what we do so easily today, what we do with conviction?
To really dig at history we must take the lenses out of old eyes and hold them up under microscopes. What did they believe? What did they think was right, what did they think was wrong? And the greatest gateway into lenses is language - because language forms and communicates our lenses, so all we need to do is look at the words that were once used and the words that changed and why... Words are not only lines, they are containers. They hold the weight of perception. They hold an ocean behind their letters. And this ocean spills out with the momentum of centuries.
Stonehill Lunatic Asylum.
Normality blurs the violence of words, of actions, of mindsets. Normality folds violence into its language - and the very tools we use to speak can become weapons. We hold histories behind our teeth - histories we perpetuate without knowing it. There is so much, once painted under the thick, silencing brushes of normality, that would be jarring to us today. Just as there is so much, today, that would jar the future.
Stonehill Lunatic Asylum. I find it written there as I'm thumbing through directories in the university archives.
I'm supposed to be digitizing old photographs, scanning and uploading them onto the bulky old library computer, but in order to save the photographs into electronic files, I have to attach some kind of qualifying information to its caption. The only distinguishing feature this one photo has in it is a sign. The Candy Shoppe, written in a stenciled font. I can tell from the familiarity of the brick buildings, although morphed now as they are through time, that the photo was taken on Water Street. Now to find a date... I have to pour through old directories. This book's from 1922, and I can't find the Candy Shoppe among its listings so I reach for 1921. I'll keep working back like this until I can isolate a vague window of time this photograph was possibly taken in.
I'm moving onto 1921 but the S section catches my eye - catches my thumb. It halts the page before I can flip it shut. Someday, it would be called Stonehill Asylum. Lunatic removed. But here, in 1922, the word is still burned into it in type-cast font, the page fading to sepia through the wearing of years. I have to be careful flipping through these pages, wearing gloves and turning each sheet gently so as not to tear its brittle glue off the spine.
