Memories lose their architecture after a while.
In between the facade and the scaffolding, love can slip in and undo everything completely. The form becomes altered. Highly specific, yet fragmented. I wonder: What is the chemical composition of forgetting? Or is it willed, weathered by time? Can one help it if memory is like trying to rebuild a torn-down house from its own debris?
Proust says memory is of two kinds.
The daily struggle to recall where we put our reading glasses. And a deeper gust of longing that comes up from the bottom of the heart involuntarily. At sudden times. For surprise reasons. "We think we no longer love our dead but that is because we do not remember them: suddenly we catch sight of an old glove and burst into tears." ¹
On days when I live in beautiful ways such as putting on a delicate dress, dusting the corners of things, arranging my household trinkets, I am reminded that I do these things for myself. I am known only to my domestic space. But I wish you were still here to witness me.
"Remembering with love is like saying farewell once again." ² I get so angry at this predicament. Whose gaze do I long for? What image of myself is created from different memories? I force myself to move on to the loving act of forgetting. A loving act to oneself.
The space between what happened and what I remember happening keeps growing.
Am I moving toward truth or further away from it? Maybe these are the same direction.
“You pile up associations the way you pile up bricks. Memory itself is a form of architecture.” ³
47 Nguyen Tuan. The house is being built from debris. From construction sites. From found objects. From wallpapers and steel bars and aged plywoods. I am collecting what remains. Family photographs overlaid on surfaces that are already crumbling. Images of becoming a woman—from birth, adulthood, into motherhood. As chemicals interact an image develops. Every second somewhere a woman gives birth. Every second somewhere a photograph is taken. To create is to destroy. To build up is to tear down.
Is my memory of you my own, or a prosthetic from things gathered?
Because I cannot remember you completely, I fill in the blanks with informed fictions. In incantations I ask: Who were you in this life? I was just a person who tried to make things happen, but couldn't. I let someone swallow me whole. I let myself sink in it, and I let myself go. Because I thought loving someone meant falling into their body headfirst. And I thought living meant to always feel on the cusps of something.
"Prosthetic memories are indeed personal memories, but because they are not natural, they conjure up a more public past. A past that is not at all privatised” ⁴
Things are more likely to be remembered if they are part of a shared social experience. The brain will choose to forget what is painful. What we don't remember creates the desire to know more. What is remembered is often collaged and romanticized. Desire exists only in relation to absence. Thus, the fragmentation of memory becomes generative: an engine propelling us towards our object of wanting.
——
Tell me about the memory where I was in my Sunday best. Yes ⁵. The cream colored dress my mother wore, the flower pin in her hair and the sweet perfume. We were all together, the sea was smiling. Yes. It was here she taught me how to be in quiet ways. Has this day ever been before? Yes.
There was the first time this city hurt me. Push me to remember, and I won't be able to look away. When I look at the city of Hanoi I want to wrap my arms around her. What's left beyond this debris? Year after year all we do is gather dust. The seasons of heat and cold, the clouded sky, that family dinner tonight and the rare sunbeam that falls through the metal window frame. Please cast me in a loving light. Indeed, this image is something to reckon with. In this city, desire exists like plums ripening until they shrink into themselves.
A prose poem meditation written as an accompaniment to Van Nhi Nguyen and Nguyen Duy Anh's installation at Vietnam Art Collection (VAC), Hanoi. Their work, titled 43 Nguyen Tuan and Bien Cuoi, explores the layered, constructed nature of memory and family inheritance—how we are made up of fragments, images, and mediated traces of those before us, and the paradox of wanting to both honor and refuse that inheritance. This poem is a stream of consciousness response to their artwork. Where their work says "this is what's happening to all of us," mine says "this is what it feels like to live it."
Notes
1. Anne Carson, Wildly Constant (excerpt from a letter Proust wrote in 1913)
2. Clarice Lispector, Agua Viva
3. Louise Bourgeois
4. Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory
5. James Joyce, Ulysses (Molly Bloom's soliloquy)