"Memories are motionless, and the more securely they are fixed in space, the sounder they are."
—Gaston Bachelard
If you were to localize memory, where would it be? Is memory something we enter? Carry? Is it something we can escape? Hold?
Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska imagines memory as a place, a theatre, a show—something she can ‘leave and reenter:”
“We differ so profoundly, talk and think about completely different things… She knows next to nothing – but with a doggedness deserving better causes. I know much more – but not for sure.
I’m a poor audience for my memory.
She wants me to attend her voice nonstop,
but I fidget, fuss,
listen and don’t,
step out, come back, and then leave again.
From Wislawa Szymborska’s “Hard Life with Memory”
The beloved film critic Roger Ebert also saw memory as a performance, but unlike Szymborska, he was eager to watch it. The film of his life played to the older Ebert when he was writing his memoirs, having had sections of his jawline removed due to cancer, leaving him unable to speak.
I was born inside the movie of my life. The visuals were before me, the audio surrounded me, the plot unfolded inevitably but not necessarily. I don’t remember how I got into the movie, but it continues to entertain me. At first the frames flicker without connection, as they do in Bergman’s “Persona” after the film breaks and begins again.
From Roger Ebert’s Life Itself
Is your memory something you watch? Is it a space you enter? Is it something you experience or something you hold? Can you set it down? How do you pick it up again? Through objects or things, we make precious through caring or in a room that reminds us of our past.
The Poet Rilke once wrote that he needed to tap into a “feeling of home" to write. Emotion plus memory equaled a concept. It meant something useful. Rilke imagined home and, thus, was able to feel home.
So much of memory is encapsulated by our concept of home. Not only because our formative time is spent there but also because there is something physical about a home. It is a safe locale. Our homes contain so many of our memories that, at times, we fail to see a childhood home as it is now after we have left. This incongruity only appears when we return and feel alienated by the reality of our house without us in it.
Gaston Bachelard, a mid-20th century French philosopher of conceptual space, considered the house one of the primary locals of memory. He explains this localization as “topoanalysis."
The systematic psychological study of sites in our intimate lives. In the theater of the past that is constituted by memory, the stage setting maintains the characters in their dominant roles. At times we think we know ourselves in time, when all we know is a sequence of fixations in the spaces of the being’s stability—a being who does not want to melt away, [a being who ] wants time to ‘suspend’ its flight.
From Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space
“Theater.” There’s that word again. The same one Szymborska used. Interestingly, we often use similar metaphors to describe such personal things. Then again, that is why metaphors and analogies exist: to connect impossibly personal experiences.
Memories, whatever they are, however they are, affect us. They affect our metaphysical movement as we exist in a world. Penelope Lively calls memory a 'ballast' in her fiercely vulnerable study of life and memory. Something that rights us, buoys us, keeps us steady, and prevents us from sinking. And, as Bachelard believed, it keeps us from falling into what Vladimir Nabokov called the “infinite darkness” that stretches out from the finiteness of our lives.
The Russian novelist thought much of memory, even titled his memoirs Speak Memory. His most famous novel, Lolita, might be considered a rumination about the (futile and dangerous) idolization of youth. Memory, for Nabokov, was the means of traveling through a sphere that contained his existence—a sphere bounded by the walls of time, a sphere inescapable until death.
Memory is a motor of movement and an engine of accessibility. Without memory, we’d remain in what Lively called “the hideous eternal present.”
In his reflective writing on life and history, Nabokov exists in memory, walks around, and stretches it out.
Now she has entered her room. A brisk interchange of light values tells me that the candle on her bed table takes over the job of the ceiling cluster of bulbs, which, having run up with a couple of clicks two additional steps of natural, and then supernatural, brightness, clicks off altogether. My line of light is still there, but it has grown old and wan.
From Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak Memory
Of course, Nabokov is saying that memory doesn’t just allow us to travel through our existence; it is what gives us existence. Memory is consciousness. When this all gets too metaphysical, I reorient my thinking to the concrete, the real, the present. I return to my senses. Literally.
My choice of art to accompany this piece is a selection from the work of Irish ceramist Isobel Egan. Egan works in porcelain because “it has its own memory.” Her work deals with fragility, memory, and the personal space we create around ourselves.
It is my belief that memory must be protected as it is such an important thing in our lives, and in a sense many of us have to draw on our memories for the rest our lives. Subconsciously, I try to store memories, to keep them safe forever so that I can call on them when needed. I have always a fear of forgetting memories, or that my memories will become distorted.
Egan’s pieces are paralleled avenues, boxes with openings, opaque walls, corners, and even sky. I self-delineate in her pieces. I unpack my mind and spread out. I walk around, place things in boxes, move on, and select channels. Memory is something to enter; it is something to hold, and, mostly, it is something to hang on the wall and turn one’s back to.
Bachelard, a dynamic inspiration to Egan’s work, believed that the more fixed our memories were in space or objects, the more real they became.
By discussing the “space and shape” of memory, I am biased towards sight. Sight is our primary sense. I am highly visual. Something must be visible to me to exist.
A friend of mine can’t picture anything in his mind. He hears memory, hears his thoughts. Memory to him is Ebert’s film without a picture. Nabokov’s voice reading aloud. How does that change where he localizes the past? I must ask him.
Meanwhile, contemporary poet David Whyte places memory outside all the senses. He imagines it as “untouchable” and something that passes through us, like a wave “constantly maturing, increasingly virtuosic, often volatile, sometimes overpowering. Every human life holds the power of this immense inherited pulse, holds and then supercharges it[.]” Like Nabokov, Whyte also believed “a full inhabitation of memory makes human beings conscious.”
My favorite visual of memory comes from German critic Walter Benjamin, who gave memory both shape and space in his vast collection of books. Benjamin wrote that a collection is “something bordering on the chaos of memory.” A collection of books is a collection of memory; it is also, quite literally, a library. A space we enter and exist in. It’s a beautiful metaphor.
Read more in James Geary’s beautiful study of language and its reliance on metaphors or in my post “The Meaning and Metaphor of Stars” a look at these bright sentinels that have meant so much to so many.
Benjamin was a foremost Jewish German critic and writer living in Paris when the Nazis invaded. Fortunately, Benjamin was out of Paris and crossing the Spanish border. Still, an administrative hang-up detained him one additional night in France, and his poor health coupled with the fact that the Nazis had closed in on his Paris apartment—all his manuscripts, books, and notes—Benjamin killed himself.
I write a lot about our connection to objects because I believe it is a form of communication, memory, witness, and even existence. If memory is our consciousness anchored in things, what happens when those things are destroyed?
“Our beloved objects we carried with us from place to place were now left behind in the wagon and with them, finally, our illusions.”
Read more in Wiesel’s Night.
I’ll let Benjamin have the last word:
Ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them. So I have erected one of his dwellings, with books as the building stones, before you, and now he is going to disappear inside, as is only fitting.
From Walter Benjamin’s Illuminations