In Memory of Memory

My china boy seemed to embody the way no story reaches us without having its heels chipped off or its face scratched away. And how lacunae and gaps are the constant companions of survival, its hidden engine, fueling its acceleration. How only trauma makes individuals — singly and unambiguously us — from the mass product. And yes, finally, the way in which I am the little boy, the product of mass manufacturing and also of the collective catastrophe of the last century, the survivor and unwitting beneficiary, here by some miracle.

To start writing was to cease to be a curious listener, an addressee, and to become instead the horizon point of the family line, the destination for the many-eyed, many-decked ship of family history. I would become a stranger, a teller of tales, a selector and a sifter, the one who decides what part of the huge volume of the unsaid must fit in the spotlight's circle, and what part will remain outside it in the darkness.

Break open a notebook at any point and be reminded of your own reality, because a notebook is a series of proofs that life has continuity and history, and (this is most important) that any point in your own past is still within your reach.

The impossibility of exact knowledge is in the physical disintegration which protects the past from our trespasses; it forms a hygiene barrier against mixing with us, the present. For us, this impossibility is an advantage. The owners have left the house, they’ve gone away, and there is no one to see how we are dividing up all their many goods. For the full enjoyment of those olden days we need those who once peopled them to die - then we can begin the yearning process, trying out the role of rightful heirs. The heaped mass of witness accounts only teases us in our hunger: rifle through the bank of pictures, enlarge them, bring them up close to your eyes, spend a lifetime gazing at a single iconic image. It’s all pointless: scoop it all out, to the very bottom of the cup, it’s thin walls, you can walk into the house of the past, but you can’t penetrate it, nor will it enter you, like a chill slick of a ghost that appears out of nowhere in the warm twilight of a July evening.

Our delight in vintage, as we call it now, comes precisely from entering a past life not as equals, but like a little girl in her mother’s wardrobe, knowing full well we are trying on someone else’s belongings.

Instead of one, the only, photograph, there are hundreds. No one, not even the photographer, manages to look at every snap: it would take years. But it doesn't matter, the important thing is to store all these many moments, to keep them safe for the Great Looking, the Grand Viewer who has all the time and attention in the world, more than would fit in any lifetime, and who will draw all that has happened into one line of events. There is no one else to do it.

But guilt at the missing details hampered my ability to remember, forced me to put off asking more detailed questions. It was already clear that I would one day (when I became that better version of myself) open a special notebook and sit down with my mother, and she would start at the very beginning, and then there would be some meaning to it all – and a system, a family tree, and every cousin and nephew would be in their rightful place, and at the end of it there would be a book.

I was sixteen, wild, errant, in the afterglow of a love affair that felt as if it had defined everything in my life.

You know, my love, I never imagined that the suffering and grief of another could give me so much happiness. Now I understand your desire to see my tears, and I forgive you for all the suffering you forced me to endure. I’ve never felt such blessedness. To see a person who is endlessly dear to you suffering terribly, simply to avoid causing you suffering, to feel how dear and necessary you are to that person — my darling, that is happiness!

I once read that the important factor in discerning the human face was not the combination of features, but the oval shape. Life itself, while it continues, can be that same oval, or after death, the thread of life running through the tale of what has been. The meek contents of her apartment, feeling themselves to be redundant, immediately began to lose their human qualities and, in doing so, ceased to remember or to mean anything.