WORDSWORTH AND THE WHATCOM LIGHTCATCHER: REANIMATING THE MUSEUM WHEN THE PAST IS A THING OF THE PAST

Abstract

In the age of digital production, the alienation of texts (visual and verbal) from their own history
has deepened since Walter Benjamin declared the ―aura‖ of a work of art to be a casualty in the
age of mechanical reproduction. Right in step with the efficiency of artistic reproduction is the
efficiency of production. The strange condition of digital texts—bearing little record of the
historical moment of their creation yet existing interminably—disrupts the very idea of cultural
memory and invites one to ask: is the past merely a trope of a low tech society? And if so, does
this render museums, repositories of cultural achievements, obsolete? In the midst of another
technological revolution William Wordsworth provided unusual insight into the problem of
cultural memory loss. In his epic poem The Prelude, written in the first half of the nineteenth
century, he tracks collective cultural amnesia at different stages of a civilization, all the while
intimating through his poetic practices how to re-imagine cultural legacy. One week after the
Interdisciplinary Themes conference in Vancouver, B.C. a new museum opened in Bellingham,
Washington. Since the signature feature of the Whatcom Lightcatcher Museum—a luminous
wall—gives architectural form to Wordsworth’s aesthetic, a description of it concludes my essay.
KEYWORDS: Museum; Literature; Temporality; Wordsworth