Crozier Center for Women as Canon and Archive

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    In the archives this week, one of my groupmates pulled out a confessional journal from the Crozier Center box. I didn't get to inspect the book so closely, but just the glimpses I got provided delightful insights into the thoughts of women from decades before. The book had an older look to it - a beautifully ornate binding not many personal journals have anymore. It was full of entries written in beautiful cursive (another aspect that dated the book in my eyes) of women reflecting on womanhood and women's issues/interests. I did not get a full inspection of this book, I was privy to the sections that seemed relevant or worthwhile enough to read aloud to the group. In a lot of ways, the fact that this was how I experienced the entries provided a very telling experience of what from the past gets read aloud today - which things are relevant to this modern group of women. From just hearing the end of an entry "God I love being a woman" I could only imagine the other contents of that journal, but I also knew to expect a lot of familiar sentiments about womanhood - a lot of thoughts that continue to unite women. 

    Aleida Assman explores the differences between active and passive forgetting (and thus active and passive remembering). Active forgetting is the intentional destruction of memory while passive forgetting is the unintentional loss of memory. Active remembering, or what Assman calls Canon, is the preservation of the past as the present. The Canon brings the past forward to the present as an intentional way to preserve the past while looking towards the future. Passive remembering is the act that Assman calls the Archive. It preserves the past as the past; almost like a lost and found of artifacts that can be re-discovered and re-analyzed. Things in the archive are not turned to as a guide for the present but as a description of the past. 

    The book from Crozier was a piece of the archive. This is somewhat obvious because we had to go to the archives to find it, but this designation means more than just where it is stored. It counts as a passively remembered artifact because it is treated as the past. We were looking at it not for the purpose of repeating a tradition or trying to re-use it, but rather to see how things used to be. While it sat in Crozier for however long it did, it was part of the Canon as new writers could flip through and see what others had written, possibly using that past to influence their conduct in the present. However, now that it has been taken from Crozier and put into a box labeled Crozier Center, it serves as a relic of the past, preserved in the archive for modern and future observers to rediscover and redefine. 

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