I’m interested in all the different ways we use the word, the concept, the illusion of preservation, from food to corpses, from digital data to taxidermy, from photographs to endangered species, from edible, tangible, destructible things to fantastic constructs—preserving the past, preserving the white race, preserving the nation. We, in the West, have perceived success in preservation enough that we have made a way of life out of it. We now have a complex, a preservation complex. This complex is both material, out there—in our libraries, archives, data centers, bombproof bunkers, museums overflown with taxidermied animals now extinct, historic mansions—and psychic, inside us—in our minds where we fear the progressions of time and nature, and feel wonder, heartened, with a sense of security in our bones before the bulwarks and technological magic of the cloud, of whatever technology now preserves our life as we know it.
I am obsessed with our preservation obsession. At its heart, preservation is a quite flexible, quietly powerful concept. We preserve so as not to lose. Loss—a ghostly thing, an absent present–is feeling something that no longer is, but once was. Haunting happens when past losses traumatize the present, and so we fear losses that have not occurred, and we preserve. Haunting happens when we foresee destruction, imagine losses that have never occurred to us, and to protect against these most insubstantial of phantoms, we preserve. The roots of that verb preserve are “to guard” + “beforehand.” All losses, all deaths, all changes in form weigh upon our enjoyment of what exists in the present. We know that, in time, all things change, die; we all lose all. This is the nature of things.
Technology is our necromancy, and with it, we convince ourselves that we can protect things against change, and death. With every success in preservation, we have marveled at our power and believed a bit more that technology will win out over the ever-dying flesh of the world.
One of the historical, mythical origin points for our preservation complex is the Civil War, the war fought “to preserve the Union.” If the North fought the Civil War to preserve the Union, then we can only call preservation a transformative process. For the postbellum nation was much different than the antebellum one. The Civil War, a war of preservation, jump-started the industrialization of the United States, greatly expanded the size of the federal government, and opened up the migratory possibilities that would facilitate the Great Migration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Indeed, the federal government as we know it came into existence in an effort to conduct and win the war, and, in the postbellum period, to distribute benefits to veterans.
Of course, the preservation of the Union was a concern before the Union even existed. As early at 1787, Alexander Hamilton wrote various essays in the Federalist Papers addressing the issue, such as the six-part series (papers 15 through 20) called “The Insufficiency of the Present Union to Preserve the Union” and “Federalist Paper No. 23, The Necessity of a Government as Energetic to the One Proposed to the Preservation of the Union.” Two years later, the Articles of Confederation, which had organized the national government, gave way to the Constitution, and George Washington was elected the first president. At the very birth of the nation then, and even before then, the architects of the national power structure were thinking about how to preserve that which did not even exist yet. In a sense, this dynamic is at the heart of preservation, for it always produces something new, is always a code-word for masking transformations under the guise of maintaining that which already exists.
With rapid industrialization, necessitated by the Northern war machine to move its soldiers and ammunition, beasts and foodstuffs to distant locales, came demand for advances in preservation. While soldiers lived, they needed food that could survive long journeys without making them sick, but food canning technology, as well as chemical preservatives, were in their infancy. Canning was effective enough to have made the 1848 California Gold Rush possible, as pioneers and miners survived on canned meats and vegetables while crossing a West not yet populated with forts, trading posts, general stores, and other supply depots. However, industrially preserved food products were quite uneven in their freshness, to say the least. Civil War soldiers did not primarily subsist on canned goods, but would likely have loved to had the technology been more advanced. Even the most basic of today’s canned peaches in corn syrup or even Spam would have been a delectable dream compared to the hardtack (a hard bread, often worm-infested, nicknamed “teeth-breaker”), desiccated vegetables (think fruit roll ups made of indeterminable greenish brown substance), and heavily salted, often rancid, meats that were common fare for Union grunts. Nonetheless, the demand for canned food only increased with the war and the industrialization and urbanization it spawned, as humans traveled on trains, started cities and towns that became densely populated, cities located further and further away from tracts of farmland that fed them. By 1873, companies like Heinz and Borden made their early fortunes by selling canned food, including canned food exports following the global depression of 1873.
When soldiers died during the Civil War, they often did so far from home. Train travel was more rapid than anything that existed previously, but not rapid enough to bring a rapidly decaying corpse safely from Antietam to New Haven before the body rotted into a slack-faced, bloated, stench-emitting hazard that loved ones would not want to display at a wake. As if the natural progress of decomposition wasn’t enough, the horrible wounds suffered by men blasted through and apart by rather large shots, such as Smoothbore .69 caliber musketballs or .55 caliber Minié balls. The Minié ball was especially devastating. With its canonical shape and hollow base—engineered, quite successfully, to improve its range and accuracy—it produced ghastly effects upon entering a body. In his article “The Bullet that Changed History,” Pat Leonard writes:
“Unlike a solid ball, which could pass through the human body nearly intact, leaving an exit wound not much larger than the entrance wound, the soft, hollow-based Minié ball flattened and deformed upon impact, while creating a shock wave that emanated outward. The Minie ball didn’t just break bones, it shattered them. It didn’t just pierce tissue and internal organs, it shredded them. And if the ragged, tumbling bullet had enough force to cleave completely through the body, which it often did, it tore out an exit wound several times the size of the entrance wound. Civil War surgeons were soon overwhelmed by the gaping wounds, mangled bodies and mutilated limbs they were asked to repair as the scope of the war broadened and casualties mounted.”
If the surgeons were overwhelmed by this new class of wounds, then so were the embalmers. But like food canning technology, arterial embalming and effective chemical preservatives were developing steadily. The year 1840 had seen the appearance of an English translation of French chemist, and inventor of embalming by injection, Jean Nicolas Gannal’s groundbreaking historical study and instructional manual, Embalming, and of Preparations in Anatomy, Pathology, and Natural History; including An Account of a New Process for Embalming. This fledgling technology made Lincoln’s memorial tour possible, for after his death his funeral train traveled from D.C. to his home state of Illinois, where he would lie in state at various locales, including the Ohio Statehouse in my hometown of Columbus. Lincoln’s body had to be embalmed and re-embalmed as it made its two-week trip.
With our massive data centers and media bunkers, archives and museums, underground vaults and interstellar times capsules, we now seem to be fighting a war to preserve everything. And, as it is with all wars, this war has effects. Preservation is always a productive act, a transformative one, and its power is in the ruse of its ostensible work—to keep things the same, to prevent them from changing, to protect them against time, decay, death. But even preserved things change, as time works on them, as the humans who define their stiffened meanings shift in their views and desires. As much as we strive for things to remain the same, they change. Even in our efforts to preserve the world we change it, so that preservation becomes yet another factor in the ever-shifting forces of flux it attempts to neutralize.
[Bibliographic Note: Some of the sources I draw material/inspiration from in this post include: Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War; Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination; Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination; Wakeham, Taxidermic Signs: Reconstructing Aboriginality; Troyer, “Embalmed Vision,” published in Mortality]