A Question Of Archive

"The mess here around us is rather like my mind; it may be a good image of what goes on inside me, that's what it's like, my life is like that."
Francis Bacon

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2010/03/whats-in-the-david-foster-wallace-archive.html

Interesting to think about archive in terms of how it affects our personality, can archive or the process of same become a formative influence? Certainly "archive" offers others an insight into ourselves, through archiving we edit our own lives so that they may be better understood either by others or often by ourselves. What causes some to hoard and others to distance themselves from tokens or mementos of the past?

smoker/flaneur/extrovert/storyteller

Thinking a bit more about the cast of characters idea, perhaps it would be sensible to read some Benjamin/Baudelaire on the flaneur? May also throw up some ideas as to the makeup of the rest of the cast... As an aside, Benjamin was apparently an ardent archivist, not only with regard to his own work and to collections, but also engaging with the concept of archive (see image above)