Odds and Ends

In this paper I reflect on the odds and ends of research – that is to say, the fragments of notes, the miscellanea of drafts, the offcuts of applications, the keepsakes of fieldwork; in short, the archival remains of unfinished research. Through a discussion of failure, loss, the incomplete, and the abandoned, the paper poses questions about the threshold of endings. At what point does something fall by the wayside, never to be returned to? More pragmatically, what might we do with our “loss libraries”? And how might we pick up or return to those concepts, field-sites, or collaborators that we once shared, however temporarily, a trajectory with?

foregrounds the potential of the unfinished, and raises the prospect of living with the incomplete. The third questions the recent attention paid to failure and begins to think-with alternative terms, like suspension and superposition. The fourth and final part returns to consider loose ends and, conversely, on letting go. In so doing, I want to suggest that letting go might afford a different set of creative endings.

UNFINISHED
The celebrated South African novelist Ivan Vladislavi c's (2018, 1) The Loss Library and Other Unfinished Stories "brings together ideas for stories and notes on why these stories remain incomplete." These include stories that Vladislavi c "imagined but could not write, or started to write but could not finish" (2018,1). They seem, the author notes, to map onto particular phases of interest, always easier to identify afterwards, but many feature libraries, research articles, and dictionaries. Drawing from his notebooks, Vladislavi c records "unsettled accounts" or "case studies of failure" and examines where they came from and why they eluded him. There are eleven of these cases, many of which begin with a prompt for a future work (an abstract of sorts); sometimes there are notebook jottings responding to the prompt or returning to the story some years later. The book is its own thing: essay, fiction, memoir, lament. 1 The eponymous story is perhaps the exception to this theme of failure in that it is more or less fully formed. The Loss Library is the middle text, the hinge perhaps, of the collection, and sees a young man follow a librarian along a corridor, and then through a series of rooms (each under lock and key). Along the way, the librarian-acting as tour guide-explains what is to be found in the various cabinets they encounter. At the first one she explains, "'We like to start here … because the idea is easy to grasp'" (2018,58). This cabinet contains lost books. Or the first kind of lost books: "books which would have been written had the writers not died young" (2018, 58). All these books have a green dot on their spine indicating that they were, paradoxically, never in print (or NIP, as the librarian explains). She asks if the young man, possibly a researcher, is looking for someone in particular. He is, and she points out the books in question. The researcher stares intently at the books: he can make out the author's name on the spines, but the bindings are all the same and the "titles blur and fade" (2018,59). And when he asks to look at one, he's quickly told that this is not allowed due to the consequences it might have, although "the extent of the disruption depends on the book" (2018, 60). She suggests that "slim volumes of poetry, minor novels … , ephemeral chapbooks and pamphlets" might exert "some small pressure on a corner of the real" (2018, 60), but other books might have the potential to change everything. The second room has another set of books that were never written but this time "their authors lost faith in them and turned their hands to other things" (2018, 62). The librarian seems particularly saddened by these, describing them as talked away by their authors: Talking is easier than writing, and that is why so many stories are frittered away in conversation, told to pass the time in a queue, or to impress a dinner companion or stranger in the bar. The lucky ones have a second life of sorts: you will find their shadows in someone else's book. (2018,63) The next section of the library houses books that "once existed but were lost for one reason or another" (2018, 63): swept away by floods, destroyed by fire, or mislaid in drawers, attics, and libraries. 2 Passing still further cabinets and vitrines, they come to the final part of the tour.
In this room "rows of ghostly books float on the air, the shelves around them dissolved" (2018,65). These are the books that "come to their authors in dreams and were forgotten in the light of day" (2018,65). At this point, the short story comes to an abrupt, if not entirely satisfying, ending, with the young man realising that he is dreaming too. He hurries to write the story down, only for it to slip away from him.
There is another story which also speaks to me from this collection. It is called, simply, Dr T. The prompt is brief: "Remember to write the life story of Dr T." Vladislavi c begins by talking of his hoarding tendencies: "My house looks like a public library or some archive of the ordinary; I cannot get rid of a book or throw away a receipt … " (2018,95). What difference will another stack of documents make, he asks himself, when people entrust him with their articles? One person had even left him their articles while they went travelling and then promptly died. But the case of Dr T is even more troubling for Vladislavi c, in part-or so it seems to me-because he had been living with his articles for a decade or so longer. These articles frighten and depress Vladislavi c in equal measure; he makes attempts to sort and classify, and he begins unfinished lists and charts. Much of the material, though, remains in trunks. Each time these are opened, he feels as though he is starting over. Vladislavi c cannot bring himself to return them (to a family member of Dr T), but equally seems unable to return to what is inside. And yet he is desperate to find some order, to draw out a story; in short, he wishes to do something with them. Over the years, though, Vladislavi c describes how he feels closer to the containers than that which is contained; he develops a "rapport with the trunks, less as repositories of evidence than as objects interesting and valuable in themselves, and this may well be the key to completing the task" (2018,(97)(98).
It is perhaps in this spirit, then, that I find myself impelled to think about a range of projects that did not quite turn into the articles that had initially been hoped for (or expected of me, in institutional terms, although the difference between the two can be difficult to discern). That is to say, I find myself impelled to think about a series of fragmented archives less as a repository of evidence-of having thought about a range of topics (a kind of disciplinary turf-staking)-and rather as an opportunity to reflect on how to revisit, repurpose, or simply let go of my metaphorical trunks of articles (electronic folders scattered across various devices). And, further, might those odds and ends do something that is not commensurate with either output or loss?

APPENDICES
Reading Vladislavi c makes me think of Henri Lefebvre's (2014) The Missing Pieces, which catalogues a series of works that were either unfinished, lost, forgotten, destroyed, or never even made. 3 It is both a history of what is no more and what never was: "artworks, films, screenplays, negatives, poems, symphonies, buildings, letters, concepts, and lives that cannot be seen, heard, read, inhabited, or known about" (2014, np). I think too of Kate Zambreno's (2019) Appendix Project, a collection of talks and essays, written over the course of a year or so following the publication of another book. Strikingly, she writes of how "there's so much potential and energy in a project that is unfinished," and how she is "compelled to keep circling back to [her] failures and errata … " (2019, 54). The Appendix Project is, for her, a desire "to gesture to the many variations of the project both future and past that are absent from the final, printed version" (2019, 65). I return to the book, having been reminded of it, and find that Appendix D sets me off on a tangent. Zambreno (2019, 69) mentions reading in an "interview with Anne Carson that when she sets out to write an essay … she has about six books in front of her, and the task of writing is to write about how they connect with each other." I spend the next hour or so looking for the interview (there are no references provided by Zambreno), wondering what constitutes "recent," and searching for various combinations of "desk," "books" (not terribly helpful, that one), and "ideas." I realise at some point that at least two of those terms are not actually mentioned in-text. Eventually, I find a joint interview from 2021-two years after the book has been publishedwhich is with Carson's partner (Elkamel 2021). He asks her: I've underlined Bevis, a former colleague who I spoke to no more than two or three times, so that's probably why it catches my attention. Perhaps this is exactly what is meant by the banality of motives. And yet, I can't help but wonder what Carson would make of this "romance of motifs." I look up the text that is mentioned, in part because I like the title, "My Coincidences." There is nothing. I try the direct quote, instead. It seems to come from a text called "Some Birds," published in 2020, one year after Phillips' text. I start to wonder if I know how to use Google, and try to circle back to what I am supposed to be writing about. But I also wonder if perhaps it is these tangential explorations that are precisely what tend to get excised from our writing, or (occasionally) corralled into an appendix. 4 Perhaps the appendix, as a form or genre, allows for the excessive (there's just too much), unruly (this just doesn't fit), and supplementary (this is not strictly necessary). Perhaps all articles should have appendices for those kinds of things. Perhaps this is the tension of creative endings, understood as both a letting go and a holding on.

FAILURES
One article that I worked on for what felt like years (and which actually was years), was on failure. It was probably more appendix than article, on reflection. That perpetual draft, a version of which was delivered as a talk in an echoey room in Chicago, stemmed from a sense that failure had become rather appealing (O'Gorman and Weery 2012). This was the opening claim in a special issue on failure, which drew attention to how often we hear that we must fail in order to succeed. In short, failure is acceptable "only if we learn from it, only if it leads us to ultimate success" (2012, 1). More than this, failure has been embraced, fetishized even, as part of an entrepreneurial spirit in which the kinds of failure we often read about are turned into coherent narratives-filtered as "something nearly admirable, certainly confessable, and improving experience" (Lamont 2015, np;see also Kessels 2016). This is perhaps most evident by the ways in which Samuel Beckett's (1999) (Beckett 1999, 102) I don't particularly want to dwell on throwing up for good. Nor do I want to suggest that writing about a loss library is somehow something admirable. I also don't want to intimate that these failures made whatever I am currently working on (whatever that may be) possible. But going back to that draft, if only for a moment, I am struck that this "ghostly text" (to return to Vladislavi c) is already out of date. There is little to salvage here; I know that this draft will most likely remain in that form. I minimise the Word document and half-remember that there has been a special issue on failure (Davies, Disney, and Harrowell 2021). I check the contents of the special issue and my attention is caught by an article on losing interest (Anderson 2020). It seems to have the opposite effect on me. I make some notes, especially where the article suggests that failures involve "stopping, interrupting, pausing, or suspending futures" (2020, 2). I am reminded of Paul Harrison's remarks about "breaks and gaps, interruptions and intervals, caesuras and tears" (2007, 592). 5 When I first encountered this passage, I read it as a critique of non-representational theory, understood as a philosophy of plenitude in which there is no real failure. It is, after all, a world of becoming (Connolly 2011), a world of "pluri-potential," made up "of complex interdependencies, circulations and events" (Anderson 2010, 782); in short, a world of excess. This philosophy of plenitude might be traced a long way back but as Marcus Doel (2009) has noted, we might consider that, within Geography, this disposition has been closely linked to the uptake of poststructuralist thought. 6 For instance, Foucault (2004, xv) strove to "withdraw allegiance from the old categories of the Negative." To Foucault's list of such categories (law, limit, castration, lack, lacuna), we might add failure. If we consider the etymology of the term, we can also see its relation to the notion of disappointment (from the Latin, to disappoint or deceive).
I'm reminded of how Gaston Bachelard struggled with a similar set of questions when reading the work of Henri Bergson. He described it as a "philosophy of fullness and … a psychology of plenitude" (Bachelard 2016, 15). For Bergson (1998), the perception of discontinuity is due only to the limitation of our comprehension. And as Christina Chimisso (2016, 7) notes, Bergson argues that "we cannot stop perceiving; that suppressing something only means replacing it with something else; and that negating something means affirming something else." For Bachelard, however, disruption (and here I wonder if this is what Harrison or Anderson might call an interruption), or what he calls an "essential failure," would "shatter being, breaking up the becoming that is totally inseparable from being. Failure must thus remain partial, superficial, and rectifiable" (Bachelard 2016, 18). I open up the draft document on failure once more and scroll to the end. In the conclusion, I suggest that it is rather tempting to follow Erin Manning and Brian Massumi (2014, 103) in their contention that failures are "opportunities for the emergence of new techniques of experimentation which push … toward an engagement with the limit of what can be thought/created in a particular context." In other words, failure is always provisional. It is an interval, a pause, which helps to foster an incipient success. A suspension, of sorts. In more spatially freighted terms, we might consider how success and failure can exist in a state of superposition (Massumi 2015, 11). This is to say that success and failure are not only difficult to disentangle, but they also coincide. The logic here is one of "and"-success and failure-and not one of "either/or." The implications of this have to do with judgement, and it is here that I am a little uneasy, if only because it might seem that this is a lapse into relativism. How, too, is this different from the memeification of Beckett, where failure is something to aspire to, as something which will necessarily feed into the next success? (And might the logic of neither/nor be a more compelling way of theorising radical failure?) But perhaps an ethic of plenitude is important precisely because it interrupts or suspends the prevailing managerial and auditory culture of research funding (Strathern 2000), which seek to "institutionalise, codify and restigmatize failure" (O'Gorman and Weery 2012, 3). It is for this reason, then, that drawing attention to failure as something other than the inverse of success is-despite how closely this seems to parallel the saccharine tones of a self-help manual-worth underlining.

LOOSE ENDS; OR, LETTING GO OF TRIVIALITIES
When I started writing this, I wanted to include excerpts from my own "failed" projects. I was going to list them as items of my own loss library. But as it went on, I couldn't really see what purpose the excerpts served. They interrupted the writing, which I liked, but they didn't make much sense on their own terms, untethered as they were from the draft that had been set to one side (More details on request). I had hoped that the provocation to think about creative endings might serve as a prompt to not only revisit things which had been left, abandoned, or in some instances lost, but to find a way of working with them creatively. But I am less sure now how to return to such research strands, and still less sure about what to do with them.
It's not only the scribbled notes or the half-finished articles, of course, but concepts that we turn away from or lose interest in (I can think of a few … ). Or those field-sites which now seem much too distant, quite fixed as part of a collection of memories that tend towards the incidental, part of both a previous project and a different set of personal stories and relations (and the nagging feeling that were you to revisit, it might no longer be there). Or those collaborators with whom you worked so intensely, who are now doing something entirely different. It can feel a little overwhelming to think about all that is unfinished, and it tends to only be accessible in the register of the elegiac (I am thinking once more of Eribon's unavoidable mourning for what could have been).
I wanted to tell a wider story here, of the ubiquity of failure, loss, and everyday archival remains, but I keep descending into trivia. This article is, I suppose, an outline of my own loss library. 7 I present this not as a jeremiad, but as a way of charting a range of creative unendings, understood in terms of the unfinished and the appendical. In so doing, I have highlighted not only the difficulty in discerning a singular end point but also suggested how such terms-which articulate the incomplete and the excessive-might disrupt the metrics by which much research is assessed. Relatedly, I have also gestured to how ongoing attempts to theorise failure might be recalibrated were it conceived as a state of superposition, rather than as inversion or intimation of success.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am grateful to Charlotte Veal and Ruth Raynor for the provocation of "Creative Endings" and for their support throughout. I would also like to thank Tim Cresswell and an anonymous referee, for their generous and generative comments, as well as Joe Gerlach for helpful feedback on an earlier draft.