-------------------


PROCESS NOTE/STATEMENT

"No. 004403/Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives/Reader's 
Card/Name: Jill Magi." Instructions: pick up a pass at the door and carry it with 
you wherever you go. Tell the guards you are heading toward thousands of linear 
feet of radical America. Tell them that this land mass has drawn many small 
papers and hopeful faces toward it, and you are just one in that parade. 
 
On my way in, I notice the translucent security walls: so great is the desire to dive 
in—a fall toward the middle, the pit of information and overwhelm, a bottom, 
atrium, the architect's enticement, a library, a mistake—or were the jumpers their 
own agents, spit out toward relief?  Female voiceover: "Do not speak about the 
jumpers."





For now, my comfort: the edges of vocal flaps. The thin tissue that holds an 
organ in place. Thin deterrent of Plexiglas barriers. Slips. Doubts.

I begin to search for the place where the archive wants to leap into a mouth, 
open and hungry—a desire to consume everything in order to say "worker." 
Design certain logos, translate him or him the revolutionary, him or him a boss, 
red and red. Child of a Soviet refugee father, among other untraceable attributes, 
I do not quite drop my anchor. 

On November 4, 2008, I found myself at home, scrolling the electronic finding 
guide for the archive. My body became slow, intense and machine-like and 
unable to register needs: food, movement, water. Weeks later, I pushed away 
from my desk, traveled via underground tunnels, presented the proper 
identification, and I was in. The librarian now brings me boxes and one by one 
and I open. Sitting at a wooden table, I lift the yellowed and rust-marked papers 
to my mouth—
	

	      RESTRICTED ACCESS 

	      PLEASE 

	      CONTACT LIBRARIAN 

	      RESTRICTED ACT