Anxieties of access: Remembering as a lake

Abstract

This article explores the nature of remembering as a lake, with a lake, or through a lake; the differential relationships, knowledge, and perspectives contained within; and the potentially troubling implications found at the intersection of scientific and humanistic perspectives on lake being. It also reflects on the totalizing nature of assuming a single form of memory, of archiving, or of trauma in a world of lakes riven with partially occluded, subsumed, ever-present, and retrieved stories expressed through water. Memory for whom? Recollection for whom? Archiving is never simple, never complete, and never without ingrained and intersecting structures of suppressed and channeled violence. Waters leave a trail of their own, writ on and in water. It contains stories that are recorded and relived. It has ontologies that are plural, overlapping, and multiple modes of memory captured in a hydrocommons where perspectives pool. Rather than asserting that a lake is an archive, this article concludes by proposing that it is a counterarchive where archival modes and anxieties can be exposed and explored. This is true of all waters, but lakes offer an ideal case study.