Memory Work
On hope, grace, and blue
Good morning.
Last week I saw Hanif Abdurraqib in conversation with Teri Henderson (from the Baltimore Beat) to talk about his new book, There’s Always This Year. The whole conversation was (probably obviously) great; Henderson asked really thoughtful questions and Abdurraqib is such a thoughtful, fun speaker. There was a lot of sneaker talk.
One of the notes I scribbled was about memory, in response to a fun question about research and about his specific, loving description of a particular Ohio 90’s basketball commercial that spurred the name of the book. He described his fond memory of the commercial, how he thought the “THERE’S ALWAYS THIS YEAR” banner was normal crowd footage from a Cavalier’s game, and how it wasn’t til he was working on the book and describing it to a friend that he learned it wasn’t something “organic” (whatever that means) but rather a Nike commercial. It would be easy, I think, to kind of feel angry at yourself or your memory, to feel “got” by corporate sentimentalism, but Abdurraqib described not really feeling that way, or at least not after the first hit of surprise. Instead, he said:
It is a privilege to remember things not as they were but as you hoped them to be.1
Because the point isn’t who made the commercial or the banner, right? It’s the emotional truth that matters, the actual feeling that memory calls up and how it lives with us now, how we communicate that to others. The way Abdurraqib felt as a kid watching that basketball game on TV, and the tenderness with which he remembers that kid now. It felt linked to how he talked about writing about “real people” (specifically his father) with “grace” for who they are. Not only for their own sake— though important— but also for himself, for the self that is becoming more like his father as he ages, and as a person who others also will perceive in their own way.
Perhaps that particular line stuck with me especially since I’ve been reading Maggie Nelson, in the wake of her new book release. Her earlier work Bluets is a book that honors memory, the act of remembering, and the sort of bittersweetness of being an entity whose association with our selves and each other is dependent on memory. Memory being the thing that anchors us (however tenuously) in time, that strings together experience. In Bluets, Nelson writes:
202. For the fact is that neuroscientists who study memory remain unclear on the question of whether each time we remember something we are accessing a stable “memory fragment”—often called a “trace” or an “engram”—or whether each time we remember something we are literally creating a new “trace” to house the thought. And since no one has yet been able to discern the material of these traces, nor to locate them in the brain, how one thinks of them remains mostly a matter of metaphor: they could be “scribbles,” “holograms,” or “imprints”; they could live in “spirals,” “rooms,” or “storage units.”2
Or, as Virginia Woolf puts it in Orlando:
Nature, who has so much to answer for besides the perhaps unwieldy length of this sentence, has further complicated her task and added to our confusion by providing not only a perfect rag-bag of odds and ends within us — a piece of a policeman’s trousers lying cheek by jowl with Queen Alexandra’s wedding veil — but has contrived that the whole assortment shall be lightly stitched together by a single thread. Memory is the seamstress, and a capricious one at that. Memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither. We know not what comes next, or what follows after. Thus, the most ordinary movement in the world, such as sitting down at a table and pulling the inkstand towards one, may agitate a thousand odd, disconnected fragments, now bright, now dim, hanging and bobbing and dipping and flaunting, like the underlinen of a family of fourteen on a line in a gale of wind.3
Nelson writes about love with the same sort of hopeful memory Abdurraqib had in talking about the commercial, about childhood memories that are bittersweet in reflection: with the ability to hold the past and the present together in the same fist, distinct and filled with distinct feeling but never fully enmeshed. Like Virginia Woolf’s halo of light instead of a series of lamps, she’s able to honor those past feelings and write about them with an immediacy as if they’re currently happening, even if/especially when they contradict something she now feels, or now knows to be true. From Bluets again:
190. What’s past is past. One could leave it as it is, too.
191. On the other hand, it must be admitted there are aftereffects, impressions that linger long after the external cause has been removed, or has removed itself. “If anyone looks at the sun, he may retain the image in his eyes for several days,” Goethe wrote. “Boyle relates an image of ten years.” And who is to say this afterimage is not equally real? Indigo makes its stain not in the dyeing vat, but after the garment has been removed. It is the oxygen of the air that blues it.4
I can be very mean and ungenerous in my memory, both to myself and others: I’ll blame both my personality and the fact that my natal chart is crawling with Virgo placements. I’m attracted to the idea of scribbling over earlier memories, of getting things right, because it’s so mortifying to have been wrong, as if there is a right or wrong when it comes to things like trusting in someone, or caring about something, or making a bad decision, a thing that humans just do sometimes. It’s a disingenuous idea, the impulse to pretend a goodness I don’t possess. I shredded my teenage journals, my Livejournal is locked away behind a long-forgotten password; I have a hard time reflecting on once-good memories colored by the opposite of rose-colored glasses (blue-colored microscope?). I’d like to be better at that, because I think I’m making too much space for bitterness and depriving myself the gift of growth, of acknowledging that sometimes we don’t get things right immediately out of the gate, or that sometimes nice things end.5
The extent to which this habit affects my writing as a non-memoirist is that I find it hard to write “what I know” when what I know is unpleasant, even mildly so. I’ve been struggling to really remember my teenage church years for my current project, because while I never sat down one day and decided I must never think about this again, I did spent a lot of time avoiding anything that reminded me of who I was in those years, the kind of people I knew in those years, and the mistakes I made, to the point where that girl feels something of a stranger. The journals are decades-old ash, decaying binary in a LJ computer server somewhere in Siberia.
By coincidence I’ve read a few memoirs lately in a row— just the library holds that happened to come in at the same time— and each of the three contained an Author’s Note at the beginning that acknowledged, in varying language, the subjectivity of the narrative within. In Negative Space, Lilly Dancyger writes:
To write this book, I relied on my own memory where applicable… The stories I collected through these interviews often contradicted each other, and sometimes themselves. I did my best to find something like the truth in the in-between spaces where all of these various sources overlapped…. So this story is a truth— one of many.6
I worry that including these notes are overly apologetic— maybe not a coincidence that all three I’m thinking of are written by women, though that could also reflect my reading bias as much as anything else— but in a world that is quick to search for the “real” story7 or ding a writer for not telling the “real” truth (in some cases more justified than others), I understand the impulse. I’m not arguing against accuracy or, like, journalistic ethics, but I think examining how a memory serves us and choosing to honor the emotional over the literal truth is a valuable gift sometimes, and is a much more realistic way to think about how we see the world (subjective, changeable, sometimes curated). As Nelson puts it in Bluets, “Look for yourself, and ask not what has been real and what has been false, but what has been bitter, and what has been sweet.”8
With hope,
Courtney
What I’m reading/watching/consuming lately:
“Yellow Band,” by Steve Edwards, in The Yale Review, on how a diagnosis changed his relationship to writing.
tendrills has a new double-single out today. It’s really good (I’m biased but I’m right) and you can listen on Bandcamp for free: tendrills.bandcamp.com.
Speaking of memory: this very fun find of hundred-year-old love letters from a woman’s lover, hidden in the walls of a Baltimore rowhome. (Tim Prudente and Stokely Baksh for the Baltimore Banner.)
My friend Marissa Lorusso wrote a really good review of the Zine exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum for New York Review of Architecture:
If you make a zine, its circulation depends on you (and, hopefully, other people) talking about it; if you want a zine, you have to find one and ask for it. The vulnerability in this exchange leads to a different kind of conversation—one that’s more personal, both freeing and intimate.
“A Series of Sequential Moments,” by Daniel Miller, in Pithead Chapel.
Putting red-pepper (supposedly less attractive to
ratsmammals?) suet out for the local wrens and finches to demolish in an afternoon.One of my favorite podcasts (Five to Four) did an episode this week about the campus protests/encampments to free Palestine. One of the hosts, Rhiannon, is a Palestinian and faculty member at U Texas and shares her experience being arrested for “protesting” (attending UT’s peaceful event).
A very cool interview in Vulture about the multi-translation process that went into writing Shōgun.
Judith Butler in The Intercept:
So I think that the blurring of that distinction has quite frankly become nefarious because any student who says “I feel unsafe by what I hear another student say” is saying that “My security and safety is more important than that person’s freedom of expression.” And if we countenance that, if we give too much leeway to that claim that a student feels unsafe because, say, an anti-Zionist — or a statement in support of Palestine, or a statement opposing genocide makes that Jewish student feel unsafe, we are saying that that student is perceiving a personal threat or is threatened by the discourse itself — even when the discourse is expressive rather than portending physical harm.
I saw Challengers and The Fall Guy in theaters this week, and both were extremely good (and extremely different). I have a huge soft spot for Ryan Gosling that may be influencing my enjoyment of TFG, but it was just such a fun time made by people who clearly have a deep love of stunts and the art of doing stuntwork for film. It felt really joyful. At home, I watched Satoski Kon’s Perfect Blue for the first time (new Blank Check miniseries) and thought it was magnificent, creepily prescient about the internet.
Admiring the Met Gala coverage: my favorite is maybe Elle Fanning’s organza and resin Balmain or maybe Eiza González Rivera’s Del Core, but any time I get to look at dresses (and a decent amount of good suits, including the only mention of Gaza I personally saw) is good by me.
Hanif Abdurraqib in conversation with Teri Henderson, 30 April 2024, Greedy Reads Baltimore. All transcription errors my own with apologies to Mr. Abdurraqib for any mistakes.
Nelson, Maggie. Bluets. Wave Books, 2009.
Woolf, Virginia. Orlando. Harcourt annotated edition, 2006. (58)
Nelson, Maggie. Bluets. Wave Books, 2009.
If I sound uncharacteristically morose please know that I am on week three of a broken water heater and are therefore on week 2.5 of a persistent, low-grade panic attack. I could really use some mental grace right now!!!
Dancyger, Lilly. Negative Space. SFWP, 2021.
Including me! I read a nonfiction book (not really memoir, though it did have personal experience in it) a few weeks ago where the author mentioned running into an author she had hooked up with in the past whose first book came out at the same time hers did, but which had sold thousands of copies/won awards/etc. There were enough details (year, city, gender) that I spent a few minutes googling to see if it was obvious who the dude was. (It was, with a little effort). I don’t know why it’s tempting, but it is.
Nelson, Maggie. Bluets. Wave Books, 2009.