A Note on Memory

from LARB Quarterly, no. 36: Are you content?

Fi i and Drama

For Bernadette, May 12, 1945 – November 22, 2022

by Perwana Nazif

In July 1971, Bernadette Mayer shot a roll of film each day and kept a rigorous daily journal. Conceived as an installation, Memory was first exhibited at 98 Greene Street in SoHo, New York City, in 1978. Over 1,000 sequentially placed images were set to six hours of recorded poetry the outcome of Mayer’s real-time impressions and reevaluations upon viewing her developed photos. In 2020, Mayer’s installation was translated into book form by Siglio Press; it includes full-color scans of the original slides, give or take a few from the original installation, and 200 pages of Mayer’s writing. Siglio is set to print a second edition later this year.

Mayer’s experiment with memory and consciousness through exhaustive visual and articulable means eludes attempts to capture a complete representation of experience and experience-as-remembered. The orders are incommensurable: Bernadette’s poetry does not caption the photographs just as the photographs do not illustrate her words. Her poetry announces limits, the lacunae between and within the image(s), the edges that border, the points where words reach their exhaustion, that all approach the carnality of memory but can never embody it in total. And yet, Memory does not fail Mayer’s project isn’t testing whether experience can be directly represented in entirety through the seeable and the discursive. Mayer tests with openness, an unbounded hypothesis that, instead, experiments with these two orders to see what they reveal about memory in short, in what the seeable and sayable do. We testify to these gestures: reflection coated upon reaction; a reanimation of the inert; being as gridded, interrupted, and transformed; the gap that opens.

Beginning her July 3rd entry, she writes “So why dont you come over every saturday, why dont you teach us every monday: more than 30 years have passed since that moment when is anything permanently forgotten photograph: monday a window of a factory, tuesday a small white handkerchief with ‘a merry christmas’ embroidered in red across one corner, wednesday a man’s black striped pants, thursday a light brown earthenware jar, friday an earthenware jar like thursday but darker in color, saturday a saucer with a pattern of brown & gold squares round the edge, sunday a metal cream pitcher.” A picture of colors inaugurates Bernadette’s week, broken into daily vignettes within the day, while the tiled images on the following page, a false continuity, read of reflecting and perspectives that ascend. It conjures inwards prompting collaborative remembrances. As for myself, Monday long drive west, tuesday steam emerging from the pavement, wednesday a closed book, thursday a pie for two, friday a pie for one, saturday a scalloped body suit, sunday a bagel in half and cone incense that comes with captions, tangerine daydream and love must. detail, July 1, 1971 detail, July 2, 1971 detail, July 3, 1971 detail, July 4, 1971 detail, July 5, 1971 detail, July 6, 1971 above

More listings, but images: Bernadette, yellow taxis, shopping carts, Bernadette again, diner counters, zoomed-in cityscapes, friends, intimate kitchen scenes, intimate bedroom scenes, intimate bathroom scenes, evidence of writing, her Ed, light, light exploding, light crackling, waters in various forms, vegetation, images that seem more in succession than others, underexposed or superimposed. Patterns emerge of repeats with differences, thick and thin images that prompt, a vehicle in various times and spaces. Of the latter, what do they carry through? The images exist in verb form rather than verbal they simply and not so simply do.

Her listings read moody, read impulsive, read incantatory, read attest to this or forget, read work put in and working through not to an ending. The singular of Memory points to the inherent and participatory plurality contained in the singular the seemingly singular contains multitudes. I have a friend that writes Bernadette is the one. Her memory continues.