emotional archaeology

T. Wrienghiemton Balseverrie, Chief Curator of Fragmentaries at the New Salxoxque University Department of Emotional Archaeology wrote an essay describing the profession of Emotional Archaeology in last Orrsday's Amutpsa Gazette.

If you've walked by the train tracks of Asinetpro near the Ochsie divide anytime in the past five star cycles, you've seen the rocking chair. There are popular theories concerning the chair's provenance, bar stories, and party stories. There's even a thread about the chair on one of the threads available on the local datanet. Most can't walk past it without wondering about it.

In the Laboratory for Emotional Quanta deep in the recesses of New Salxoxque University's Eastern Octangle, we have a number of machines designed to explore the cosmic network intertwingularities of fragmentary, sparse, widely distributed, or otherwise ancient and old things, long separated from the people for whom they held great value, emotional and otherwise.

Pictured below (although not in this excerpt), is a Neskaleyene-Garriptro Event Structure Distiller. It masses at two hundred million metric tons -- although most of that's a result of the wee bit of hypercooled glasma which is hyperspatially tethered to the scanning assembly, and as a result it doesn't affect the local gravitational metric tensors. This machine is a beast to use, not so much because it's difficult to use -- the instruction manual is a model of lucidity, but because the extent of incapacitating horrors and abuses to the spirit witnessed through the holographic display is paralyzing.

Maxhuatl Apehfe's Stuffed Animals Project 10 years ago was probably our department's greatest misstep. On the wall in my office I have both press clippings about the project as well as letters from the family members of the researchers.  Apehfe had brought some stuffed animals found in a charity bazaar in Oxfai sold in bulk assortments, and had (quite reasonably, as any young researcher might) thought that it would be interesting to place them in the event structure distiller. Maxhuatl Apehfe, Sineria Achuit, and Hoherxge Greun have been coping with a rather severe form of post traumatic stress disorder as a result. I'm sorry this happened. I'll quote Hoherxge: "People are, er, not, hmm. Stuffed animals are proxies for a parent's affection, and the abjection of hoping that one might hug you back as well as the large scale cultural ramifications of their thingness -- and I've got two, Mr. Confusington, a weregazebo, and Flootm, a cuddly pion which I've had since I was a month old and are people to me -- I didn't think about it too much before we brought the Oxfai Exiles in. Now Maxhuatl, Sineria, and myself frequently quaver with "hug all the quarks in the universe if they'd be okay with it". "

There's Riet Gueithz who does paper pieces research. She went to Oquizbe and ordered 10 tons of Salquirnabron Corporation Recycled Paper, Grade A. She uses the Lehepzfa-Marsillis Contentment-Scry (yes, it looks like an air conditioner with glued bananas that has been dipped in liquid helium and dropped from a very far distance slowly breaking apart in slow motion) and catalogues on-the-cusp dust of peculiar emotions. She's not concerned with joy or pain, but with xylem-uncertainty-not-tainted-by-brickwork, mitochondrial-affinity-marinated-in-colored-pencil-sketches, smiling-superfluid-xenon-waving, and so on.  "Part of the maturation process of any civilization is to have a more detailed and precise emotional vocabulary. Finding name-shy emotions on the saddle hypersurfaces between the binaries of good and bad enables civilizations to be able to better cope with trying times. The scraps of paper I usually deal with are a hundredth of a octagonal millimeter in size. The research papers I submit to the Journal of Emotional Archaeology contain many diagrams about those hypersurfaces, listing rational points and submanifolds, as well as discussing their saddles in poetic language"
Our work is not easy. We produce many maps and tables of discarded subtleties and obscure sublimities, but while doing so, our hearts sag somewhat.