Light streams down, clear and warm, through a glass grid in the ceiling, and as the day expands, shadow bands slowly find their way across the long wooden tables far below. The reading room is speckled with researchers of diverse ages, most of whom are tracing relatives long since returned to dust, and conversations rise and fall, ping-ponging back and forth, soft and reverbed and sounding like the origins of polyphony. Somehow, everyone in this book-lined corral seems further away than they actually are, until they're right beside you.

Sitting here listening, the past is somehow more distant than ever and, at the same time, closer to the skin. Camped beside a microphone, I zoom through the structure in my mind, through its fabric, into darkness, backstage, into the presence of the stacks behind. Free from my body and hovering among the various collections of newsprint and magazines and index-cards and celluloid and folders and microfilm and phone directories and prison records and magnetic tape and muster rolls and on and on, through cages and fridges and racks and shelves and around endless corners, I sense their mass, the pressure and humidity of their desire to push back through the concrete and the rebar, back out into the sunlit present.

The steadicam slides down the lift-shaft to the basement, which is really a partially buried ground floor, and into the museum. History is here, Ohio seen from the perspective of animals and minerals and, of course, humans, both the Europeans who began to call themselves American, and those who were American before the designation existed. There are displays of objects embodying various key moments on the Ohioan time-line, authentic signifiers for public consumption, artefacts like The Mica Hand, with its haunting looping musical accompaniment, and an electrically powered reproduction of a wooden mill, which groans and grinds ghost grain.

Pushing out through the glass and I'm in the parking lot with the highway at my back, hovering at the foot of the cast staircase curving up against the waist of this Brutalist hour-glass. As is often the case, this thing looks simultaneously precarious and impregnable, a massive top-heavy mega-fort erupting from the crest of a sculpted mound. The archives are up there, cantilevered out into thin air in a basement in the sky, wrapped around the reading room, encased in board-marked concrete and coated in a layer of bricks. And there they wait, safe in the darkness and dust, holding their breath.

Dennis McNulty/ January 2014.



The Colours Return to The Surface Of The Earth - Dennis McNulty

The Relay Project