#in memory of memory

[heavenlyyshecomes]

I was reading Marianne Hirsch’s classic work, The Generation of Postmemory, as if it were a travel guide to my own head. I knew everything she described immediately and intimately: the ceaseless fascination with one’s family’s past (and, beyond this, with the densely populated human context for these lives, the thick undercoat of sounds and smells, the coincidences and concurrences, the synchronized turning of the wheels of history) and the clinical boredom with which I roll my own contemporary world backwards to that past, back to them, and feel quite certain, in-my-gut certain, of how it was back then, the tram routes, the stockings that sagged around the knees, the music from the loudspeaker. Any story about myself became a story about my ancestors. There they were behind me like an opera chorus encouraging my aria – only the music was written seventy years ago. The structures that emerged from the black waters of history fought shy of linearity, their natural state was co-presence, the simultaneous sounding of voices from the past, contradicting the obvious: time and slow disintegration.

—Maria Stepanova, In Memory of Memory tr. Sasha Dugdale

[heavenlyyshecomes]

It’s not just the dead who disappear in the mirrored corridor of reproduction—the living do, too. Siegfried Kracauer describes the process with photographic precision in his essay on photography: we can break down what our attention does to a photo of our grandmother into its various phases, how she literally disappears before us, vanishes into the folds of her crinoline, leaving only a collar, a chignon and a skirt bustle on the surface of the image. The same thing happens to us. With every new selfie we take, every group shot or passport photo, our lives become arranged into a chain of images, a history which is quite different from the one we tell ourselves and want others to believe. The line of was-and-will-be, a compendium of single moments, poses, mouths open to speak, blurry chins, none of which we chose ourselves. Balzac foresaw some of this and refused to have his photograph taken, reflecting that each new picture removed a layer of balzac, pared it away, and if you let it happen, soon nothing would be left of you (or what would be left was only a puff of smoke, the vegetable heart, and the very last layer, the thickness of a death mask).

—Maria Stepanova, In Memory of Memory tr. Sasha Dugdale

[heavenlyyshecomes]

Jacques Rancière’s essay Figures of History makes many arguments that seem urgent for our times. He says, for example, that the artist’s duty is to show ‘what can’t be seen, what lies beneath the visible’. This pleases me, because the late Russian poet Grigory Dashevsky always saw this as the role of poetry, to bring the invisible to the point of visibility. Rancière’s most important point is this: in his writing about history, he contrasts ‘document’ and ‘monument’. A ‘document,’ for him, is any record of an event that aims to be exhaustive, to tell history, to make ‘a memory official’. A ‘monument’ is the opposite of ‘document’, in ‘the primary sense of the term’: “that which preserves memory through its very being, that which speaks directly, through the fact that it was not intended to speak – the layout of a territory that testifies to the past activity of human beings better than any chronicle of their endeavours; a household object, a piece of fabric, a piece of pottery, a stele, a pattern painted on a chest or a contract between two people we know nothing about…”

—Maria Stepanova, In Memory of Memory, tr. Sasha Dugdale

[heavenlyyshecomes]

For the interested reader, diaries and notebooks can be placed in two categories: in the first the text is intended to be official, manifest, aimed at a readership. The notebook becomes a training ground for the outward self, and, as in the case of the nineteenth-century artist and diarist Marie Bashkirtseff, an open declaration, an unending monologue, addressed to an invisible but sympathetic ear. Still I’m fascinated by the other sort of diary, the working tool, the sort the writer-as-craftsperson keeps close at hand, of little apparent use to the outsider. Susan Sontag, who practised this art form for decades, said of her diary that it was ‘an instrument, a tool’ – I’m not sure this is entirely apt. Sontag’s notebooks (and the notebooks of other writers) are not just for the storage of ideas, like nuts in squirrels’ cheeks, to be consumed later. Nor are they filled with quick outlines of events, to be recollected when needed. Notebooks are an essential daily activity for a certain type of person, loose-woven mesh on which they hang their clinging faith in reality and its continuing nature. Such texts have only one reader in mind, but this reader is utterly implicated. 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. Sontag’s notebooks are filled with such proofs: lists of films she has seen, books she has read, words that have charmed her, the dried husks of completed endeavours – and these are largely limited to the notebooks; they almost never feed into her books or films or articles, they are neither the starting point, nor the underpinning for her public work. They are not intended as explanations for another reader (perhaps for the self, although they are scribbled down at such a lick that sometimes it’s hard to make out what is meant). Like a fridge, or as it was once called, an ice house, a place where the fast-corrupting memory-product can be stored, a space for witness accounts and affirmations, or the material and outward signs of immaterial and elusive relations, to paraphrase Goncharov.

—Maria Stepanova, In Memory of Memory, tr. Sasha Dugdale (emphasis mine)

[teathed]

[lohtulauluja]

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.

- Maria Stepanova, from In Memory of Memory

[hvacinth]

The subjectivity and selectiveness of memory means we can fix on a historical 'excerpt' which has nothing in common with history itself - there will be people out there for whom the 1930s were a lost paradise of innocence and permanence. Especially during times dominated by the dull fear of the unknown. In comparison with a future we don't want to inhabit, what has already happened feels domesticated - practically bearable.

In Memory of Memory, Maria Stepanova