When it comes to memory maybe I am holding a card of unlucky draw and unaware that in any other hand the deck would have been consulted again: the rules of the game are not so impervious to will.
When it comes to memory what I will say is this: we don’t choose much of it, and that should leave some tenderness towards the cells mopping up what you would have left alone or terminated. It’s the fridge-lit kitchen while you wait for water to filter which makes sense for and of the fielded time. Remembering is a matter of negotiation. What I wish to ultimately recollect involves figures and plots I have but one hand in; what I do my best to save stands to be interfered with, whether or not I am cautious.
Memory is also, presently, a form of climate guilt. There is an incessant heat-producing taxonomy of what we never again access (what we needn’t, and didn’t, request exist with precision), with its guise, only sometimes true, of protecting us from a version of what we already know. (1984: if power executes itself such that two and two are five, endless war does disappear the problem of whose hands were shaken or withdrawn).
What practices for memory-keeping are we acting out, and how do they jive vestigially? What do we mean when we say we are reigniting what once was? Before recall was imagined colloquially with pragmatism—before it was braggadocios between smaller features and greater potential—what made memory: how could we be sure we were engaging in it?
Format is one answer—oral traditions, recorded history, family albums—but outcome another. The thinness of my walls has made itself known to me and I fret over conversations I’ve held: would that I could string all their beads and pick out the most scandalous eavesdrop. Accordingly some functions tease their heads out. To forget can be to shame oneself for not having the foresight to curate with more precision; to enact memory can be at once accidental and fruitless, guard and rupture, disastrous and forecasted, communal litany and individual game.