In Memory of Memory

Highlights

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

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

clean order of history

Nabokov writes about existence as ‘but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness

I wanted to fix them in my mind, to prepare for future writing-up. A linear narrative made no sense for this: the line itself was so shakily drawn. I simply noted down everything that seemed important not to forget; on each square of paper a single word or a few words, which straightaway reconstructed a location and happening in my memory; a conversation, street corner, a joke, or a promise

On other days the albums lay on the shelf and time merely passed

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…

The eyes are the first thing you notice in an old picture: they seem lost because their gaze is searching for a person who is no longer there, a person who once recognized them

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).

This is what lies behind the stories about Gertrude Stein becoming with the years more and more like her portrait by Picasso, or the story about Oskar Kokoschka’s subject, who (it is said) subsequently went mad and came to look exactly like his image.

With the invention of digital photography, yesterday and today have coexisted with unprecedented intensity

Whether you want it or not, you are facing the strange extension of your existence, your outward form preserved for all time. All that disappears is what made you yourself.