Мария Степанова - In Memory of Memory

I remembered all of this many years later when I tried to read the old family correspondence to my father. He sat and listened for ten minutes with an increasingly downcast expression, and then he said that was enough, everything he needed to remember was in his head anyway. Now I understand him almost too well: over the last few months my state of mind has likened looking at photos to reading an obituary. All of us, both the living and the dead, seemed equally to belong to the past, and the only possible caption: “This too will pass.” My father’s old and new photographs in his Würzburg apartment were the only things I could look at without feeling shaken: the empty leaf-scattered riverbank with a black boat, a yellow field without a single human figure, or a meadow of a thousand forget-me-nots, no human touch, no selectiveness, just purity and emptiness. None of this was painful to look at, and for the first time in my life I preferred landscape to portrait photography. The Japanese album with the grandparents lay in a drawer somewhere and neither of us wanted to let it out.

One spring I had the pleasure of spending a few weeks in Queen’s College, Oxford, where my book and I were received with open arms, as if my occupation were reasonable and respectable, rather than some embarrassing obsession, a sticky flypaper spotted with quivering, half-dead associations. My college lodgings had white walls lined with bookshelves, but I had nothing to put on them. In the dining halls and libraries memory had a different meaning, one that had so far been alien to me. It was no longer the endpoint of a wearisome hike, but the natural result of duration : life generated memory, secreted it, and it deepened with time, disturbing no one and causing no one anxiety.

I’d come to Oxford to work, but I found it hard to get down to writing because life there was tranquil and it made me feel stupefied, as if I’d been placed back into a cradle that had never in fact existed. Every morning I touched my bare feet to the old wooden floorboards with the same feeling of gratitude. The gardens were vessels of trembling greenery, and the nightingale rattled its empty tin above them; even the way the delicious rain dispensed itself on the perfect facades and stone follies filled me with tender delight. I sat at my desk every day with my pile of pages and stared straight ahead.

The road outside the college was called the High, and it loomed very large in my life. The right-hand side of the window was turned toward the interior of the college, and its cool shade. The left-hand side faced the High that in sun or rain drew my gaze like a television screen; it stubbornly refused to disappear into the horizon as a road should and instead tilted upward like a ship’s deck, higher and higher, so the people and buses seemed to become more visible as they moved away from me and no figure, however tiny, ever quite disappeared. Against all probability they seemed to move closer and become more distinct — even the mosquito cyclist, the slant line of his wheels — and this trick of perspective preoccupied me, halted my already intermittent progress.

The endlessly fascinating life of the street moved in intricate patterns like a puppet theater, to the hourly ringing of bells. The long-distance coaches thundered down the street, eclipsing the light, and at the bus stop the drivers changed places; people appeared from a distance and moved closer, while remaining always in view, and sometimes deliberately standing out, like the long-legged lanky girl who came out into the middle of the road, performing a circus-style leap. In short, my idleness could not be justified, but like a character from a Jane Austen novel I sat for hours at the window watching passersby who did not fade into oblivion, but became larger and more recognizable with every passing day. I was continually amazed that I could look out of the window and count the buses at the top of the street where it twisted away, and I became obsessed by the way people, with their tiny jackets and even tinier sneakers, remained forever in focus. It was like watching the mechanism of a clock that had moving figures to mark the hours. A large and glossy black car turned the corner as if this was the deepest past, when even the smallest detail gained the aura of a witness. Only there was nothing to witness, it grew warmer and lilac shadows brushed the opposite pavement.

Then one day Sasha took me to the Ashmolean Museum, to see a picture by Piero di Cosimo called “The Forest Fire.” The long horizontal picture resembled a multiplex wide screen showing a disaster movie. It occupied a prime position in the museum, but in the shop there wasn’t a single postcard or coaster with an image from the painting. Perhaps that’s understandable, as the painting is far from any notion of comfort. It was painted in the early sixteenth century and is supposed to make reference to Lucretius’s poem De Rerum Natura and contemporary controversies over Heraclitus’s doctrines. If that is the case, then Piero agreed with Heraclitus, who said fire coming on would “discern and catch up with all things.” Something similar is depicted on the wood panels of the painting: Doomsday on the scale of a single island, overgrown with bushes and trees and inhabited by all flesh, both of fowl, and of cattle, and of every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

The painting resembles a firework going off, as if a carnival were taking place in the forest: flashes of red, yellow, and white streak the panels to an inaudible and deafening crack. The fire is not only the center of the picture, but the omphalos of their universe, and from it the dozens of stunned beasts canter, crawl, and fly in dotted lines, not knowing what has happened, or who they are now. My sense of it is that this is an image of the Big Bang, although the painter wasn’t yet aware of such a name.

Animals, like the newly created galaxies, scatter from a central point — you can’t look away from it, it’s like the open door of a stove, or the mouth of a volcano. Like lava they have not yet ceased their flowing, to the extent that some of them have human faces. There were doubtless also people in this world, at least there were before the fire. They have a wooden well on an outcrop. And there are a few people, just sketched lines, like frescoes in Pompeii. They are definitely humanoid, although alongside the beasts with their warm corporeality, they look like shadows, like the outlines of humans on a wall lit by an explosion. There is one survivor, a cowherd, clearly drawn, standing half-turned toward us, as bewildered as his lumbering cattle, ready to lower his head and charge with them. His face is not visible, just the stick, the implement he uses because he knows, like Heraclitus, that “beasts are driven by blows.”

The beasts cross the painting in pairs, like the inhabitants of the ark, and the fact that some are partly human causes neither distress nor affront. The human faces grew on the beasts as they ran — on the domestic pig and the deer — and they are notable for their expression of gentle thoughtfulness. It’s said that the artist added the faces at a late stage, when the picture was nearly finished: one theory is that they are caricatures done at the patron’s request. Yet there is not a shadow of comedy about these wreathed hybrids, they look more like students of philosophy who have gathered to stroll under the oaks. Still, even this I can’t quite comprehend — a transformation is taking place, but its logic is hard to grasp: is man becoming animal before our eyes, or is animal becoming man, growing a human face, just as it might grow horns or wings? Did Daphne become a laurel, or did the bear become its human hunter?

It would seem that in a postapocalyptic world the beasts are the remaining humans; and all hope resides in these animate creatures. There they are, the family of bears bowing fearfully before the lion’s fury; the unbending golden eagle; the melancholic stork — all the carriers of distinct qualities, ready to emerge as egos, as “I”s. In contrast we, the humans, are barely distinct, we seem no more than raw material, or rough drafts for a future that might or might not come to pass. The rest were saved and they inherited the earth, and walked upon it, live and blocklike like the figures in paintings by Pirosmani or Henri Rousseau.