Overall Favorite Books of 2016
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7.
HOLD STILL
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“Memory is never a precise duplicate of the
original… it is a continuing act of creation,” pioneering researcher Rosalind Cartwright wrote in
distilling the
science of the unconscious mind.
Although I lack early childhood memories, I
do have one rather eidetic recollection: I remember standing before the barren
elephant yard at the Sofia Zoo in Bulgaria, at age three or so, clad in a
cotton polka-dot jumper. I remember squinting into a scowl as the malnourished
elephant behind me swirls dirt into the air in front of her communism-stamped
concrete edifice. I don’t remember the temperature, though I deduce from the
memory of my outfit that it must have been summer. I don’t remember the smell
of the elephant or the touch of the blown dirt on my skin, though I remember my
grimace.
For most of my life, I held onto that memory
as the sole surviving mnemonic fragment of my early childhood self. And then,
one day in my late twenties, I discovered an old photo album tucked into the
back of my grandmother’s cabinet in Bulgaria. It contained dozens of
photographs of me, from birth until around age four, including one depicting
that very vignette — down to the minutest detail of what I believed was my
memory of that moment. There I was, scowling in my polka-dot jumper with the
elephant and the cloud of dust behind me. In an instant, I realized that I had
been holding onto a prosthetic memory — what I remembered was the photograph
from that day, which I must have been shown at some point, and not the day
itself, of which I have no other recollection. The question — and what a
Borgesian question — remains whether one should prefer having such a prosthetic
memory, constructed entirely of photographs stitched together into artificial
cohesion, to having no memory at all.
That confounding parallax of personal history
is what photographer Sally Mann explores throughout Hold
Still: A Memoir with Photographs— a
lyrical yet unsentimental meditation on art, mortality, and the lacuna between
memory and myth, undergirded by what Mann calls her “long preoccupation with
the treachery of memory” and “memory’s truth, which is to scientific, objective
truth as a pearl is to a piece of sand.”
In a sentiment that calls to mind Oliver
Sacks’s exquisite
elucidation of how memory works, Mann
writes:
Whatever of my memories hadn’t crumbled
into dust must surely by now have been altered by the passage of time. I tend
to agree with the theory that if you want to keep a memory pristine, you must
not call upon it too often, for each time it is revisited, you alter it
irrevocably, remembering not the original impression left by experience but the
last time you recalled it. With tiny differences creeping in at each cycle, the
exercise of our memory does not bring us closer to the past but draws us
farther away.
I
had learned over time to meekly accept whatever betrayals memory pulled over on
me, allowing my mind to polish its own beautiful lie. In distorting the
information it’s supposed to be keeping safe, the brain, to its credit, will
often bow to some instinctive aesthetic wisdom, imparting to our life’s events
a coherence, logic, and symbolic elegance that’s not present or not so obvious
in the improbable, disheveled sloppiness of what we’ve actually been through.
Nearly half a century after Italo Calvino
observed that “the
life that you live in order to photograph it is already, at the outset, a
commemoration of itself,” Mann traces this
cultural pathology — now a full epidemic with the rise of the photo-driven
social web — to the dawn of the medium itself. Reflecting on the discovery of a
box of old photographs in her own family’s attic, she echoes Teju Cole’s
assertion that “photography
is at the nerve center of our paradoxical memorial impulses” and writes:
As far back as 1901 Émile Zola
telegraphed the threat of this relatively new medium, remarking that you cannot
claim to have really seen something until you have photographed it. What Zola
perhaps also knew or intuited was that once photographed, whatever you had
“really seen” would never be seen by the eye of memory again. It would forever
be cut from the continuum of being, a mere sliver, a slight, translucent paring
from the fat life of time; elegiac, one-dimensional, immediately assuming the
amber quality of nostalgia: an instantaneous memento mori. Photography would
seem to preserve our past and make it invulnerable to the distortions of
repeated memorial superimpositions, but I think that is a fallacy: photographs
supplant and corrupt the past, all the while creating their own memories. As I
held my childhood pictures in my hands, in the tenderness of my “remembering,”
I also knew that with each photograph I was forgetting.
BRAIN PICKINGS
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