In last week’s installment devoted to David Maisel’s Library of Dust, I noted that he registered that what is now called the Oregon State Hospital operated a gas crematorium for decades and decades. It remains unknown precisely where and how many unclaimed bodies of its residents were disposed of between 1883 (at the institution’s founding) and 1913, when the gas crematorium commenced. So many were treated thus, however, that, by 1924, the numbering system had registered 524 such copper canisters already. At least 5,121 such unclaimed bodies (forgotten or ignored by friends and family) were burned thus and turned into handfuls of ash.
Library of Dust is built upon the 110 near life-size, long-exposure, full-color photographs that David Maisel took of the canisters. Each photograph singles out and makes almost monolithic, these canisters, photographed in the dark, against a black background. Each canister contains the cremains of a human being, each numbered consecutively, each decomposing quite differently.
Like wandering souls, perhaps, the canisters had moved all over the place, first from the crematorium to various store-rooms, then, in 1976, the year I graduated from Sprague High School there in Salem, Oregon, to a sort of underground crematorium in the basement of Building 40. They suffered again and again, the indignity of periodic flooding from ditches and creeks (the Mill Creek that runs through town) and so were moved several more times including to, finally, a store where, in 2000, David Maisel first encountered them.
“Library of dust” is how a task-bound inmate, to Maisel’s face, dubbed the store-room in which Maisel found his footing and project. One of Maisel’s interlocutors, however, Geoff Manaugh, asserts that, while dust is a library, the cremains-located store-room is “not a library at all—but a room full of souls no one wanted” (n.p.).
Books Will Speak Plain. These photographic monoliths now bespeak plentiful questions and great, heaping cart-loads of unease on me, the reader. Who dies? How do people die? Who is there when they die? What happens to their bodies upon death? Is the corrosion and colorful decomposition of the copper canisters a sort of cypher that unlocks the secret of residence and punishment in a state facility? Shouldn’t the dead relate meaningfully to the living? Shouldn’t respect and security accompany the newly dead on their journey?
“Crazy.” “Insane.” “Mentally ill.” “Library.” “Hospital.” “Institution.” “Patient.” “Inmate.” “Resident.” #524. #1165. #2125. The ashes of a human being. The dust of the library in which they are shelved. An institutional product. Unclaimed. Unsuccessfully treated. Anonymous.
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