Agnes’s Candle

In 1924 Agnes Inglis hears of a collection of anarchist papers at the University of Michigan. It’s been donated by Joseph and Sophie Labadie and sits in a corner, gathering dust. It is an archive that has survived numerous purges, seizures, and repression of anarchist thought, history, and life. 

So she begins working to organize this collection. She has neither asked permission nor been asked to do so. But she is doing it anyways.

Organizing, filing, and making it available to the public. Stealing furniture from the university and bringing it to the corner the collection languishes in. 

As her work continues, many of her contemporaries begin to worry that the beautiful dream they carried is dying. Weighed down by wars, deportations, fascist and bolshevik brutality, depressions, and immense loss.

But Agnes is in the archives and young people are contacting her. Knowing that there is a secret trove of anarchist thought and life. They’ve heard about it.

And so in 1932 she writes a poem to the archives and the memory they hold of those who fought and left behind their words and deeds for others. 

—

Gather, dust, and rays of sun-heat beat imperceptible, beat.

And let the unbound wrapped-up volumes of voices of dreamers and world builders keep their silence, and time will leisurely emerge out of space, out of events so measured.

Perhaps no dreamer, no builder of worlds will reincarnate you into his thoughts, his deeds: you may rest for long under the dust, wrapped up in brown paper and tied with string awaiting the judgement day.

But—one day—that day—young dreamers, young builders, will untie the strings and unwrap the volumes and they will cry out! They will say “My Brothers! My Sisters!” They will say, “You dreamers, you worldbuilders!” And they will peruse these old records of voices and they will repeat your words and speak your names.… As, in these volumes, your thoughts and the record of your acts lie in silence, the dawning spirit of the Revolution will sweep on.… It is sweeping on! And your thoughts and your acts—past though they are—are not lost in it. And this, the record, will ever be beloved.

Agnes Inglis

Illustration and article by N.O. Bonzo from https://kolektiva.social/@nobonzo/115068111677998698 Inglis’ poem ‘To the Labadie Collection’ [‘Signed Agnes Inglis, Summer of 1932, Ann Arbor Michigan’] is quoted in Kathy Ferguson’s Letterpress Revolution : The Politics of Anarchist Print Culture (2023). It’s preserved in “Reflections, Part II.” Box 25, Agnes Inglis Papers, Joseph A. Labadie Collection, Special Collections Research Center, University of Michigan Library. See https://findingaids.lib.umich.edu/catalog/umich-scl-ams0198.