Мария Степанова - In Memory of Memory

Obverse:

Arthur Rimbaud was interested in new technologies. He sent his family long lists of essential items, dictionaries, reference books, tools, and equipment to be delivered to him (no easy task) in Abyssinia. The parcels arrived in Harar. There was always something missing, but his camera at least arrived safely. Seven of the photos Rimbaud took have survived. In a letter to his mother and sister, written on May 6, 1883, he describes three self-portraits, including one “les bras croisés dans un jardin de bananes.” In another he stands by a low fence, which looks like a cartoon railway track. Beyond the fence there is nothing. Uninterrupted desert, filling the whole print. You might think you can see a point where the gray of the land washes into the gray of the sky but it’s unlikely. If we believe his account, Rimbaud the entrepreneur, in his white trousers, was photographed in “un jardin de café” and “sur une terrasse de la maison,” but it would be hard to imagine anything less like a garden. Although we can only really guess at what we are seeing because something in the developing or printing of the pictures went wrong. All the photographs Rimbaud took — the market square with its awnings, the tiny building with a many-sided cupola, a man sitting in the shade of a column with bowls and gourds laid out in front of him — are fading to white, and there is no way this process can be stopped. The photographs are disappearing before our eyes, slowly, imperceptibly, like the ring of moisture left by a glass on a table.

Reverse:

Google Maps makes efforts to renew its satellite photographs as often as possible, but not always and not everywhere. Many towns, with their boulevards, tourist information offices, and unattractive monuments have a reliably unchanging profile for months, if not years: if you zoom in on Moscow on a snowy evening you see summer roofs and green spaces. Nearer the center of the earth, or wherever the program considers that to be, the changes happen faster — but even so they aren’t fast enough. A woman leaves her lover, he smashes up the car and it goes to the scrapyard. He leaves town, she unfriends him on Facebook, but on Google Maps the colorless box of the car is still parked outside her door.

Obverse:

In his documentary tales of Istanbul, Orhan Pamuk describes a particular variety of local misery called hüzün , very different from European notions of melancholy, which arise from an awareness of the shortness of life. Hüzün , on the other hand, is not directed at the future and the sense of life passing, but at what has already passed and yet still suffuses our daily lives with its soft glimmer. The sensation is brought on by the counterpointing of past greatness with present wretchedness and mediocrity. For Pamuk it is based on a classic “before and after,” what was and what has come to be, his bifocals allowing him to keep both the created model and its destruction (the ruin and its former glory) in focus. He remembers Ruskin in a passage where he talks about the chance nature of the picturesque, about how we find a visual pleasure in decay and dissolution, a pleasure that no urban architect has ever intended us to feel, in the deserted yards and marble flagstones overgrown with grass. A new building becomes picturesque “after history has endowed it with accidental beauty.” In other words, after history has chewed it up and spat it out, unrecognizable.

Pamuk also quotes Walter Benjamin’s phrase about the exotic and picturesque features of a city being of more interest to those who do not live there. When you think about it, the phrase applies equally to different forms of the past, not just its visibly aging stone skin of towers and turrets — but all the other boxes and cases in which a person packs and unpacks herself. Houses, beds, clothes, shoes, and hats — anything abandoned by its owner that hasn’t yet quite fallen apart is suddenly filled with a new posthumous brightness. 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.

The more the contemporary world plays at olden days , the further those days recede, spinning slowly down to the murky depths where nothing can be made out. 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, its tin walls, you can walk in to the house of the past, but you can’t penetrate it, nor will it enter you, like the chill slick of a ghost that appears out of nowhere in the warm twilight of a July evening.

Obverse:

…and then I suggested to myself that I divide memory into its three types.

The memory of what is lost, inconsolable, melancholy, keeping tally of these losses while knowing that nothing can be returned.

The memory of what has been received: sated after-dinner memory, contented with one’s lot.

The memory of what has never been — seeding ghosts in place of the real. Like the magic comb of Russian fairy tale: a deep dark wood springs up where the comb is thrown down and helps the hero to escape pursuit. The phantom memory does much the same for whole communities, protecting them from naked reality and its drafts.

The object of remembrance can be the same in all cases. In fact, it is always the same.

Reverse:

My fear of forgetting, of allowing anything to escape my hold — my mind — from the still-warm past, was justified and even extolled in the Old Testament. What is more, the people of the Old Testament were obliged to remember, and any failure to do so led to certain death. The chapters of Deuteronomy insist repeatedly on the remembrance of God: “Beware that thou forget not the Lord thy God, in not keeping his commandments, and his judgments, and his statutes, which I command thee this day.” The scholar of Jewish history Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi recounts in his book (itself called Zakhor , the Hebrew imperative “remember!”) how this powerful drive to remember lasted all the centuries of exile and diaspora. It was memory that demanded the scrupulous adherence to laws, to the achieving and the preservation of perfection — not by the individual, or the family, but by a whole people taken as one. A pure, holy life became the pledge that ensured survival, and no single detail could be lost or omitted.

Unusual historical events, understood to be without precedent, gave rise to the fear of forgetting. The prohibitions and obligations of Jewish faith were in some ways the result of these events, their imprint left on the mutable human wax. For many generations there was no further attempt in Jewish tradition to chronicle what had happened to the Chosen People, as if the Torah was the last word on the subject and nothing more was needed. It’s said that the Russian futurist poet Velimir Khlebnikov quickly lost interest when reading out his own poems and would break off with “and so on and so forth…” Yerushalmi describes something similar in Zakhor , but with different words: “Perhaps they already knew of history what they needed to know. Perhaps they were even wary of it.”