I used to harbor a continuous worry that I’d forget what had happened, that I’d fail to notice what was happening. I worried that something terrible would happen because I’d forgotten what had already happened. Perhaps all anxiety might derive from a fixation – on moments – an inability to accept life as ongoing.
– Sarah Manguso, from Ongoingness: The End of a Diary
The music of video games. They are fitted into tables. You can drink, you can lunch, and go on playing. They open onto the street. By listening to them you can play from memory.
The Pizza Hut in Gaffney had a cocktail-table video game of “1942.” Mom buys me a pair of Solar Shades and passes a quarter to play while we wait on a pepperoni with green pepper and onion. I play from memory: take a barrel roll and blow those Nakajimas out of the sky.
He claims that electronic texture is the only one that can deal with sentiment, memory, and imagination.
I’ve never agreed. Who says no? It’s not so easy forgetting how to play the drums.
He described to me the ceremony held at the zoo in Ueno in memory of animals that had died during the year.
At the Cleveland Zoo, I asked my aunt why she married my uncle.
And beneath each of these faces a memory. And in place of what we were told had been forged into a collective memory, a thousand memories of men who parade their personal laceration in the great wound of history.
Each leaving a loss, each loss a wound: Canton, Gaffney, São Paulo, Tokyo, Wooster, London, Pittsburgh, Prague, Brest, Dębica, Kraków. Even leaving Dubrovnik after a few days is masakra.
That’s how history advances, plugging its memory as one plugs one’s ears.
Memories are knocked out poorly without earplugs.
I’m writing you all this from another world, a world of appearances. In a way the two worlds communicate with each other. Memory is to one what history is to the other: an impossibility.
Memory all too possible: forgetting does the real damage in its impossibility. History is never impossible; only as compared to history is memory sometimes impossible.
I envy Hayao in his “zone,” he plays with the signs of his memory. He pins them down and decorates them like insects that would have flown beyond time, and which he could contemplate from a point outside of time: the only eternity we have left. I look at his machines. I think of a world where each memory could create its own legend.
A world in which each memory creates its own machine, more likely. Cannot—must not—sufficiently investigate that simulation. Too fatigued by outrage and devtool-babble.
Everything works to perfection, all that we allow to slumber, including memory. Logical consequence: total recall is memory anesthetized. After so many stories of men who had lost their memory, here is the story of one who has lost forgetting, and who—through some peculiarity of his nature—instead of drawing pride from the fact and scorning mankind of the past and its shadows, turned to it first with curiosity and then with compassion. In the world he comes from, to call forth a vision, to be moved by a portrait, to tremble at the sound of music, can only be signs of a long and painful prehistory.
To understand that prehistory before forgetting it. To understand very little, to already have forgotten some, most.
But it was then that for the first time he perceived the presence of that thing he didn’t understand which had something to do with unhappiness and memory, and towards which slowly, heavily, he began to walk.
After each happiness of memory, ASMR.
I remember that month of January in Tokyo, or rather I remember the images I filmed of the month of January in Tokyo. They have substituted themselves for my memory. They are my memory. I wonder how people remember things who don’t film, don’t photograph, don’t tape. How has mankind managed to remember? I know: it wrote the Bible. The new Bible will be an eternal magnetic tape of a time that will have to reread itself constantly just to know it existed.
I remember snow in the month of January in Tokyo. Two inches, max. School called off. We met in Harajuku and tried out some longboards. By afternoon the snow had melted, we skated around Shinjuku.
That a short wave announcement from Hong Kong radio picked up on a Cape Verde island projects to Tokyo, and that the memory of a precise color in the street bounces back on another country, another distance, another music, endlessly.
Is it a choice? Precise colors on the streets of Santo Amaro, Ebisu, Ohio City, Farringdon, Ridgewood, College of Wooster, Squirrel Hill, Žižkov, Krowodrza, Hongdae, Újlipótváros, Delfshaven.
All those who remember the war remember him.
His father took photos in Vietnam with a Japanese camera. The tail of a downed American bomber, torn off the fuselage, down the road.
Madeline traced the short distance between two of those concentric lines that measured the age of the tree and said, ‘Here I was born… and here I died.’ He remembered another film in which this passage was quoted. The sequoia was the one in the Jardin des plantes in Paris, and the hand pointed to a place outside the tree, outside of time.
To meet the person you could have become, become that person prepared to meet who you could have become.
He said, “I will have spent my life trying to understand the function of remembering, which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather its lining. We do not remember, we rewrite memory much as history is rewritten. How can one remember thirst?
How long will you take to forget the secret?
One day, quite some time ago, I happened on a photograph of Napoleon’s younger brother, Jerome, taken in 1852. And I realized then, with an amazement I have not been able to lessen since: “I am looking at eyes that looked at the Emperor.” Sometimes I would mention this amazement, but since no one seemed to share it, not even to understand it (life consists of these little touches of solitude), I forgot about it.
– Barthes, Camera Lucida
Forgetting: non-presence, non-absence.
To open to forgetting as accord with what hides. Forgetting, with each event forgotten, is the event of forgetting. To forget a word is to encounter the possibility that all speech could be forgotten, to remain close to all speech as though it were forgotten, and close also to forgetting as speech. Forgetting causes language to rise up in its entirety by gathering it around the forgotten word.
In forgetting there is what turns away from us and there is the detour that comes from forgetting itself. There is a relation between the detour of speech and the detour of forgetting. From this it follows that, even saying the thing forgotten, speech does not fail forgetting but speaks on its behalf. The movement of forgetting.
When we are missing a forgotten word it still indicates itself through this lack; we have the word as something forgotten, and thus reaffirm it in the absence it seemed made to fill and whose place it seemed made to dissimulate. We seize in the word forgotten the space out of which it speaks, and that now refers us back to its silent, unavailable, interdicted and still latent meaning.
In forgetting a word, we sense that the capacity to forget is essential to speech. We speak because we have the power to forget, and all speech that works in a utilitarian manner against forgetting (all speech of recall, encyclopedic knowledge) runs the risk – risk nonetheless necessary – of rendering speech less telling.
Speech ought therefore never forget its secret relation to forgetting; which means that it ought to forget more profoundly, hold itself, in forgetting, in relation to the sliding that belongs to forgetfulness.
Any TV anchor who interviews Trump needs to print this out and commit it to memory.
TV in loving memory: Rasheed Hassan Khan devoted life to rights of peasants.
Water has memory. Ganga is carrying impressions, feelings, memories . . . She is a living entity. Rivers have rights.
One of the most brutal knockouts in recent memory. Let’s have no more of these daft catchweight fights!
Make me an option, and I’ll make you a memory.
New 5.5 Comfort 3” Twin Memory Foam Mattress Topper.
Time to sleep . . . (cue marching band, mother’s disapproving voice, and the memory of women who never wanted you).
Looks like the house of memory here.
Funny how the hours stretch, melt away my empathy. Persistence of a memory.
That’s just how I was brought up. Your girl should never touch a door or walk in a room behind you. It’s muscle memory now.
In loving memory of Johnny Depp. He ain’t dead, I just love remembering him.
Study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in.
Good luck getting the memory of people laughing at you dislodged from your brain.
There is never a single approach to something remembered. The remembered is not like a terminus at the end of a line. Numerous approaches or stimuli converge upon it and lead to it. Words, comparisons, signs need to create a context for a printed photograph in a comparable way: that is to say, they must mark and leave open diverse approaches. A radial system has to be constructed around the photograph so that it may be seen in terms which are simultaneously personal, political, economic, dramatic, everyday, and historic.
– John Berger, from “Uses of Photographs”
Memory’s a funny thing, isn’t it. You don’t agree? I don’t agree either. Memory has never amused me much, and I find its tricks more and more wearisome as I grow older. Perhaps memory simply stays the same but has less work to do as the days fill out. My memory’s in good shape, I think. It’s just that my life is getting less memorable all the time. Can you remember where you left those keys? Why should you? Lying in the tub some slow afternoon, can you remember if you’ve washed your toes? (Taking a leak is boring, isn’t it, after the first few thousand times? Whew, isn’t that a drag?) I can’t remember half the stuff I do any more. But then I don’t much want to.
– Martin Amis, Money
Did y’all forget that this happened last time the boys were on a yacht?
I remember forgetting to write 2005 on my math book in school. Where did the years go?
2043: five great sci-fi novels to make you forget Star Wars.
We can’t forget about the senior pets who need a lifeline more than ever at shelters.
Forget nice dinner reservations, let’s go on an adventure.
Don’t forget that a new year doesn’t guarantee a new you. Growth won’t be any easier this year. We still need grace and grind!
Gen Sharif reportedly said in DC that normalizing relations with India would mean forgetting Kashmir, which he won’t do.
Our polite maknae, not forgetting to bow after the end of the performance.
Data scientists keep forgetting the one rule every researcher should know by heart.
I became middle-class without forgetting that once I’d been poor. Shameful, I know.
Finding oneself nostalgic for Badiou?
It’s like I’m starting YouTube for the first time, OMG so nostalgic and weird.
Elliott Smith Pandora is making me all kinds of nostalgic heading into the New Year.
Pure nostalgic beauty wrapped around the modern power of a high output twin cam 103B engine.
How did nostalgic literature become an agent in American racism?
Why do these snooty, homogeneous, class-obsessed white dudes nostalgic for a dead empire have British accents?
What kind of nostalgic moment is this!
Feeling nostalgic today. Wondering about the “what ifs.”
Does anyone ever listen to music and feel nostalgic? Not because you’ve heard it before, more like your blood remembers?
Been missing that nostalgic feeling that ’90s fashion had? It’s back!
Anamnesis means remembrance or reminiscence, the collection and recollection of what has been lost, forgotten, or effaced. It is therefore a matter of the very old, of what has made us who we are. But anamnesis is also a work that transforms its subject, always producing something new. To recollect the old, to produce the new: that is the task of Anamnesis.
– from The Speculative Turn (re.press)
LETHATECHNIQUE: WRITING TO EXTINGUISH 