'Metaphors are all we have to describe memory': Kristin Prevallet's 'A Burning Is Not A Letting Go' at Guernica

In response to Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents, the theories of Oliver Sachs, and verse by Palestinian-American poet Fady Joudah—in collaboration with Suzanne Levine's photography—poet Kristin Prevallet discovers the meaning of memory in this trans-genre personal essay published by Guernica. The essay accompanies Levine and Prevallet's image and word collaboration called "Nothing Erased But Much Submerged," now on view at Hastings-on-Hudson Arts Commission.

In Civilization and Its Discontents Freud imagines memory as Rome, a city built upon the layers and layers of past cities going all the way back to the Palatine Hill.

Palestinian-American poet Fady Joudah writes that:
“memory shrinks until it fits in a fist
memory shrinks without forgetting.”

And Oliver Sachs writes that the past is embedded, as if in amber, until music stirs it back into life again.

Other metaphors for memory: lines in a leaf, a match connecting fire to fire, writing in the sand, file cabinets, boxes, a fog lifting, a crumpled piece of paper slowly unfolding, a library, a phoenix rising from the ash, knots in a string of beads.

Really, metaphors are all we have to describe memory. After all, they can’t be located in any specific area of the brain. Not that they haven’t tried to find them. In the 1930s, neuroscientist Karl Lashley did extreme things to the brains of rats to try and get them to forget how to run a maze. He cut, he prodded, and he even used his wife’s curling iron to try and burn different are-as of the brain. But no matter how he mangled their brains, the rats still remembered.

Memories are not contained in anything. They are not photographs that are stored the way scrapbooks are, latent until flipped open. Rather, they are fragments of information, and they are not only visual. They are sensory, tactile, and aural. They assemble when triggered in our entire bodymind system, the way dust gathers around the electromagnetism of sunlight. We collect fragments, and sometimes, those fragments coalesce into pictures. They call this “consolidation.”

Continue reading at Guernica.