Memory Needs Other People

At a high-school production of Mamma Mia this spring, the stage manager told me my name is written on the wall of the green room: some award, best actor or best director, she wasn’t sure which and neither am I. I have no memory of it at all. It is not even a faded memory; there is an absence where a memory should be. I stood looking at my own name the way you look at a stranger’s.

Memory, the science says, is not storage but retrieval: a thing reassembled on demand, and only when the associations are present to call it up. That sounds like a technicality until you follow it out. If a memory can be retrieved only through its web of associations (places, objects, and above all people), then a memory with no one left to cue it is not a memory you have lost. It is a memory that, for any purpose that matters, no longer exists. My name on that wall is real. The event is gone, because everyone who shared it has scattered, and nothing remains to pull it back.

I learned this backwards, by emigrating. For years in Tunis I thought my memory was failing: names, events, whole stretches gone soft. It was not deteriorating. I had simply walked out of the web that held it. A decade away from the people and streets that were, without my noticing, the larger part of my own mind, and the memories they cued went dark for lack of anyone to ask. Coming home to Illinois, things I had given up for lost began surfacing unbidden, handed back to me by a face, a smell, a particular intersection. My graduate-school years are the strange exception: I came out with the skills welded in like bedrock and almost no memory of acquiring them, so that the whole intense decade feels now more like something I dreamed than something I lived.

This is why I cannot make myself care about genealogy of the documentary kind. The software is good at it: birth and death and marriage certificates, censuses, land deeds, a clean line back through time. But chronology is not memory; it is nearly the opposite, a record precisely of what no living person holds anymore. If I wanted my grandparents’ lives I would not pull their certificates. I would sit them down and say: tell me your life story. Memory lives in people, and it passes, when it passes at all, through the asking. The campy stage musical undid me, of all the things to be undone by, because the mother and daughter on it were doing the thing memory requires and I keep failing at: staying in the same room long enough to become each other’s web. A friend once asked me what university gave that I have never quite found since, and the answer was that: intimacy with friends and colleagues that is only ever felt in retrospect, once there is no longer anyone in the room to remember it with.

I know all of this with unusual sharpness right now, because the woman I am going to marry is about to emigrate: to leave Tunis, her family, the language and the streets and the standing web of everyone who has ever cued a memory for her, and come here, to me, to the flat grid where I am still relearning my own past. She does not yet know what I am only now learning: that she is not merely leaving a country. She is leaving the apparatus that holds the larger part of who she has been, and some of it will go quiet, and there will be nothing wrong with her memory at all. What I can be, if I am any good at it, is the beginning of a new web. It is a small thing to set against what she is giving up. It is also, I am coming to think, most of what people are for.