What will we remember?
(written in spurts between 10 May and 30 November, 2020; revised 3/11 Jan 2021)
What will we remember?
Will we have the perfect vision
of twenty-twenty
wisdom in hindsight
and difficult lessons learned
in this year of the pandemic?
It all depends on where you were
--and where you are when memory strikes—
sheltered in place with roof and walls
paid for, your life and its paraphernalia
un-mortgaged,
closets full of seasonal wear
and cupboards neatly stocked;
or
leaning against the weak bamboo
and flimsy tin
listening to the blue plastic
shiver
because you did not have the strength
or means to make a roof;
fingering the notes, no longer crisp
from the day’s labour—such as there is—
counted out,
a measure of sweat and muscle;
or left with only your memories
and the fading noise of traffic
on streets once meant for travel
towards dreams, or dreams of work;
or waiting, walking, wanting
or forced
to return to a place you once escaped
its borders never a refuge,
only a reminder of what was
to be borne,
what one was born into.
It depends, like much else
of what we remember
and what we forget;
on what is inscribed into our bodies
and what flows, or is papered
over in our minds,
when smell-touch-taste
disappear
in a biochemical haze
gone viral,
or when muscle
no longer has the strength or space
for memory.
To remember is to allow the salt
to lick, to nick
wounds that cannot heal.
To remember is to unknow
the possibility of moving on.
To remember is to make
muscle memory of experience.
To remember is to feel gratitude
To remember is to stoke anger.
To remember is to die
every day.
To remember is to once again discover
living.
But what slice of memory slides into habit,
and grows quiet
within the folds of doing
what we do,
in the insidious takeover
of a New that quickly turns Normal?
Does remembering preserve us,
or keep evolutionary record?
Does it seep deep into
the genetic coda,
the body’s defense
against the mind’s amnesia?
Will we remember
the new-found quiet
that once seemed so elusive
yet once heard
morphs into
dull, repetitive
emptiness?
Masks, soap, water, distance,
all markers of a Something
whose origins settle
into a mechanical Doing
like those icons on our desktops,
flattened symbols
that have lost their beginnings,
and the generations for whom they
were material
drift away,
leaving not even a binary trail
in the ephemeral cloud[s].
Even as we remark—
in our emails
our telephone greetings
our notes to our forgetting selves—
on the strangeness of the moment,
on how “unprecedented” these times are,
will we remember
what makes it strange?
Or, having had the rug pulled
from under our tentative feet,
will we simply hold on
to words offered to us
in the million streams of social media posts,
crutches emptied of significance
and substance,
a million transient images—
#WFH #pandemic #stayathome #staysafe—
all bookmarked to a page
that’s disappeared into an internet archive?
But without these--
without
the boxes-on-screens
and forwarded texts
and pings from across oceans
and time zones,
the trackers and the data points
the claps and clangs and balcony serenades
the frontlines and the backstops--
how would we mark this long moment?
As these acts/words turn into digital bookmarks
that are guaranteed to show up
in years to come
on a #TBT--
Will we remember
--in our bones, in our blood--
how uncertainty
turned into resignation
and into acceptance
and then a way of being,
as systems-never-set broke down,
hastily rebuilt in political promises,
only to dissolve
as numbers continued to rise
[#Covidtracker],
distant until they loomed large,
a rising curve,
in cities and communities, neighborhoods and homes,
positives everywhere,
felt deep inside
lungs, nose, eyes, and
in our blood and in our bones?
Will we remember
how the Exceptional
turned into Routine?
How the horror became background noise
filtered through our screens
as the eerie silence slunk away,
overtaken by traffic-as-almost-usual
and the images captured
in once-in-a-lifetime opportunities
by photojournalists
made us forget that this was
no exception
but a recitation of the routine
hiding in plain sight,
a subterranean lifeworld
that had always occupied
the knife’s edge
as the rest of us conducted
our everyday cruelties?
Will we be allowed
to remember
the possibility of stillness
of slowness
of care
the startled acknowledgment
of the invisible-rendered-briefly in news images
and crowdfunding campaigns,
even as it recedes into the shadows
of other, tinselly, breaking news?
Or will these new streams of storytelling
fuel waves of forgetting
as we [again] buy into shiny new promises
of convenience and consumption?
Will we remember
how to smile
unmasked?
Or to cover distance with touch?
Or the mundane comforts of
regular workhours
with breaks for coffee, lunch and tea?
Some things will work their way into art
nestling there till we prepare for discomfort
on occasional museum visits
and school field trips;
while others will be noted
into archives
for some future historian,
mutated by changing climate
and the withdrawal of once-connected species,
to discover and lay meaning,
to point fingers at our perfidy
or marvel at our complacence
or incompetence
and grow indignant
at our forgetfulness
and
[there is no other way to say this]
our utter stupidity.
Now.
Even as I write
The city streets scream resurgence:
horns, wheels, sirens, rush,
motoring through vestigial anxiety
and caution
in an insistent bid
to reclaim
business-as-used-to-be.
Masks dangle, are half worn,
as we begin to dismiss
those vague mythologized fears
and that muscle memory,
no longer suppressed by a fleeting concern
for a changing world,
reasserts itself.
After all, a year is not eternity
or even an aeon
and Anthropocene
is marked, if anything,
by the humdrum of crisis.
As I tap the snooze button
on my archiving device
and prepare, absently
for the start of a screened day
that seems like any other,
I briefly wonder
at the disappearance of the
new
into the normal.
I scroll back
to a synced calendar
and find cryptic notes—
could be from any place,
any time.
Remembering resides
in the obliterating white squares
of un-penciled gaps
between zoom and meet,
where once there were people,
tangled together in shared breath,
random laughter and conversation,
unmuted,
the mundane serendipities
of handshakes and hugs
and a hundred other
unthinking acts
that populated the time
before this time,
when we moved on screen
even as so many others
moved off it,
never having discovered
(or being afforded)
the possibility of alternative lives.
So, at this moment,
before the inevitable forgetting
sets in,
[jabbed into us?]
I wonder
will we remember
the retreat
from the streets
as a flight,
a refuge,
a resigned
pillowing into
a bulk-ordered
existence;
or, having nowhere
other than the street,
forced to face
the vulnerability
of exposure?
It all depends
on where you were,
where you are,
where you find yourself,
when memory
in all its costumed avatars
breaks free of its muscle moorings,
and finds itself framed
in filtered photographs of a past
edges frayed, sepia-tinted,
that we can never be quite sure
that we really lived.
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