by Brian Dillon
If I cannot now separate my unease at this turn in my mother’s religious life from my own ordinary and unspoken adolescent rebellion, I can picture clearly the image at which I baulked. My mother’s Bible was the symbol of a private agony (and a secret hope) to which I had no access. There was, I remember, another Bible: a much larger, dust-jacketed hardback volume that circulated in our household as the ‘family Bible’ (it may in fact have had some such title: I recall only its dark blue cover and the paler dust jacket which had a habit of slipping off as soon as it was opened). The black Bible remained wholly hers: I never opened it until she died, and only then did I discover its tattered secrets.
¶ Transcription
The scrap of paper has been torn from a spiral-bound notebook: one of the long, slim pads that my mother used for shopping lists, recipes and notes. The lower half of the page has been scissored off. At the bottom of the remaining portion, the blades have diagonally bisected one blue line, leaving a clue, which I almost missed, to the original shape of the page. At the top of the page, my mother has written: ‘(1 Cor. 13: 4–7)’. Just now, it took me several minutes to decipher what is written beside this initial inscription (I am still a little unsure of the first two words): ‘Read as: Thirst change me that I might be always patient, etc.’ The text does not accord with the adjacent notation of book, chapter and verse, nor with the reference on the second line: ‘Romans 8: 35–9’. The passage from Corinthians, however, is of a piece with the unidentified quotation (if that is what it is); it begins with the words ‘Love is patient and kind…’ and ends: ‘Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.’ The reference to Romans is specifically to this question: ‘Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?’
‘1 Cor. 13: 4–7’: the first numeral is a fat, redoubled bar of ink that replaces a neighbouring, failed effort. I recall very clearly the experience of watching my mother write. I was fascinated by her handwriting (as also by my father’s), the elegant product of an educational era for which writing was a kind of ritual, to be undertaken almost for its own sake. I remember that when I was very young my mother’s script was always perfectly and modestly decorated, subtle and assured in its regular curves, and I practised for hours to achieve a script as economical and attractive as hers. Even now, after decades of carelessness, I can occasionally catch sight, with a glow of private pleasure, of the brief apparition of her handwriting in my own. It can only be as a result of this juvenile enthusiasm that I recall vividly those moments when she would essay a first mark on the paper, and nothing would appear except a blank furrow. Then, holding the pen at what seemed to me an awkward distance from the writing end, my mother’s fingers would fly back and forth in a brief frenzy before a too-thick, overworked line appeared.
The first line on the slightly yellowed scrap of paper which I am holding now, inches away from my writing hand, conjures that moment precisely. I am almost tempted to fill the empty vertical of her first attempt with a straight ‘1’, my hand retracing the line she wanted to make. I would like, in fact, to rewrite the whole of this tiny fragment, giving its letters the shapes she must have tried to trace. Because this remnant of my mother’s handwriting dates from a period some years after my first enthralment to its bright blue mystery: the writing is still recognizably hers, with its old-fashioned open ‘p’ and tiny cross for ‘and’ (a convention to which I have recently reverted after years of clumsily executed ampersands), but something is wrong; her style has contracted, the letters retreating towards the middle of each line, barely venturing above or below. The very texture of the ink has altered, as if applied with slightly too much force by a hand unsure of its ability to maintain a light and uniform line. The words themselves have shrunk; their once languid drift to the right has stiffened; they are not quite perpendicular to the faint tropics of the page, but noticeably more rigid, as if the hand that wrote these words were unsure of making it to the next letter and so has delineated each a little too carefully before moving on. Some letters seem to have stalled completely. The second, upward stroke of a ‘w’ has clumsily overshot the height of the first, and the letter is now cracked into a pair of badly matched ‘v’s, utterly uncharacteristic of my mother’s serenely flowing hand. Each successive lower-case ‘h’ is a little less sturdy than the last; the fourth and final example has collapsed, the loop of its back hacked off, the spring of its ‘seat’ busted. The word ‘infinite’ has been painfully hobbled: its prefix has come away from the main body of the word, and the third ‘i’ fails to obscure an ‘a’, the evidence of a first misspelling.
A single blank line separates the enigmatic pair of biblical references from a complete sentence below. The sentence reads: ‘How deep and how high is God’s infinite love for us.’ I have no idea of the occasion on which she might have written this, nor whether it was a private reminder of a quotation that meant something to her, or a line to be read before others. But the crippled writing is enough to tell me that it dates from that period when her hands had become so twisted and agonized that she held a pen with great difficulty and had to move her whole arm to write. Her fingers could no longer make those minute adjustments which writing demands; it is as if her entire body is twisting and turning to produce these awkward marks.
My mother’s Bible was not part of our family ritual of nightly prayer. It was a private album into which she slipped fragments of prayer, memorial cards and handwritten passages from scripture. They are still there. Among them, another piece of darkening paper has been carefully torn from a missal: a portion of a Sunday Mass, ‘a reading from the second letter of St Paul to the Corinthians’. There was a time, after she died and at those rare moments when I examined the contents of the Bible, when I couldn’t read this passage without becoming furious at what I thought of as the cruelty of its message. St Paul writes: ‘To keep me from being too elated by the abundance of revelations, a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan, to harass me, to keep me from being too elated.’ I cannot read this gobbet of theological poison without conjuring the image it must have brought to my mother’s mind: her body whole and uncorrupt, open, joyously, to the world around her. And it tortures me still to think that she had to convince herself that she didn’t deserve such a life.
I don’t recall how this volume made it on to my bookshelves, but I do know that it has sat there for years, mostly undisturbed, occasionally taken down and examined in a rather detached fashion. Beyond my fury at the rigours of a faith with which I cannot identify, I have been wholly unable to connect it to my memory of my mother – until now, when, attending instead to its physical presence, to the book as a thing, I start to see its history come into focus. And I wonder now whether in fact the comfort my mother took from it was less to do with the words she copied out than with that act itself: the calm consolation of writing, even (maybe especially) when the words were not hers. The Bible reminds me, at last, of a familiar image of her: sitting quietly in the evening, copying, more slowly than before, the words that might be her salvation.
¶ Plethora
In his extraordinary short story, ‘Funes the Memorious’, Jorge Luis Borges imagines a memory reduced (or perhaps expanded) to a strict inventory of the myriad physical details which go to make up a life. The story begins, appropriately, with a litany:
I remember him (I have no right to utter this sacred verb, only one man on earth had that right and he is dead) with a dark passion flower in his hand, seeing it as no one has ever seen it, though he might look at it from the twilight of dawn till that of evening, a whole lifetime. I remember him, with his face taciturn and Indian-like and singularly remote, behind the cigarette. I remember (I think) his angular, leather-braiding hands. I remember near those hands a maté gourd bearing the Uruguayan coat of arms; I remember a yellow screen with a vague lake landscape in the window of his house. I clearly remember his voice: the sl
ow, resentful, nasal voice of the old-time dweller of the suburbs, without the Italian sibilants we have today. I never saw him more than three times; the last was in 1887…
The narrator tells us that he had first encountered the appallingly talented Ireneo Funes three years earlier, while out riding with his cousin. The latter had stopped to ask the time of this strange boy, who immediately replied, without a glance at a timepiece or at the sky: ‘It’s four minutes to eight, young Bernardo Juan Fransisco.’ Three years later, the ‘chronometrical’ Funes has been thrown by a horse and paralysed. His accident seems to have sharpened his already preternatural powers; he now recalls everything with an astonishing clarity. He learns Latin in a matter of days, and astonishes the narrator by memorizing the entirety of Pliny’s Naturalis historia; when the two meet again, Funes enumerates
the cases of prodigious memory recorded in the Naturalis historia: Cyrus, king of the Persians, who could call every soldier in his armies by name; Mithridates Eupator, who administered the law in the twenty-two languages of his empire; Simonides, inventor of the science of mnemonics; Metrodorus, who practised the art of faithfully repeating what he had heard only once.
Funes’s memory outdoes all these classical examples. He can forget nothing: every event, every impression, every fact gleaned from his endless reading and hours spent sitting at his window and staring have been consigned to what he calls the ‘garbage heap’ of his memory. So accurate is his recall that he rebels against the vagueness of ordinary language and devises a whole new vocabulary to denote numbers: ‘In place of seven thousand thirteen, he would say (for example) Maximo Pérez; in place of seven thousand, The Railroad; other numbers were Luis Melián Lafinur, Oliman, sulphur, the reins, the whale, the gas, the cauldron, Napoleon, Agustín de Vedia. In place of five hundred, he would say nine.’ The absurdity of his system is clear: it demands an impossible renovation of the whole of human speech and thought. The task of enumeration would never be complete: ‘he thought that by the hour of his death he would not even have finished classifying all the memories of his childhood.’
Borges’s story tells us something about the limits of human memory: a ‘perfect’ memory would be, in essence, indistinguishable from no memory at all. The unfortunate Funes is forced to remake his world at every moment, in an unending process of pure and pointless accumulation; he is cursed, by his very talent, with ‘certain incurable limitations’. By far the most haunting moments in Borges’s narrative are those at which the hapless prodigy is transfixed by the horrifying implacability of physical objects: the outline of a cloud, the binding of a book, the foam raised by an oar. ‘He was the solitary and lucid spectator’, writes Borges, ‘of a multiform, instantaneous and almost intolerably precise world.’
In 1970, the American artist and writer Joe Brainard embarked on a project that seems as fraught, and doomed, as that imagined by Borges. In his book I Remember, he set out, by means of prefacing each discrete impression with the words of his title, to capture his own past (mostly, his childhood and adolescence) in its most fleeting details. The book (followed by two sequels, More I Remember and More I Remember More) has the odd effect of rendering each individual recollection a mere frame in the mobile film-strip of the author’s memory, and at the same time of investing each fragile moment with significance. It is as if Brainard has written an autobiography with all the narrative drive, all the pretence at continuity and reflection, removed. Like Funes, Brainard seems immune (or so he claims) to overarching ideas; instead, he’s obsessed by the texture of things, the child’s world of objects and substances which fail to meld into a unified understanding of the world around him. Here he is recalling his covert appropriation of his mother’s belongings to his own secret vision:
I remember a small top drawer full of nylons, and my mother, in a rush, trying to find two that matched. I remember finding things in that drawer that I wasn’t supposed to see, smothered in nylons.
I remember the olive green lining of my mother’s olive green “leather” jewellery box, with fold-out trays. When alone in the house, I loved going through it, examining each piece carefully, trying to pick out my favourites. And sometimes, trying something on, but mostly, I just liked to look.
I remember learning very early in life the art of putting back everything exactly the way it was.
In the first volume of Brainard’s recollections, there are over one thousand of these entries. While many suggest a historical era – a fifties America of pale green Coca-Cola bottles, high-school yearbooks and clumsy sex – many more are quite devoid of cultural significance (the child, of course, knows nothing of ‘culture’ anyway; everything simply is what it is). Brainard affects a writerly naivety, as if his impressions are simply the written register of a vacant, unthinking sensibility, dredging from his memory so much useless and insignificant garbage. Of course, as in this brief example, he cannot help grouping his impressions in such a way as to form tantalizing micro-narratives, from which he steps back, as here, to offer laconic commentary on his own past self. Brainard, in the end, is not Funes. But he experiences his project as prodigious, even divine, in its ambition. He writes in a letter to his publisher:
I feel very much like God writing the Bible. I mean, I feel like I am not really writing it but that it is because of me that it is being written. I also feel that it is about everybody else as much as it is about me. And that pleases me. I mean, I feel like I am everybody. And it’s a nice feeling. It won’t last.
Inspired in part by the examples of Borges and Brainard, the English artist Emma Kay has in recent years produced a body of work that tests the power of her own memory and makes of its inevitable failures an allegory for the generality of human forgetfulness. Kay’s most mnemonically ambitious work is The Bible From Memory, completed in 1997. Like Joe Brainard, she puts herself in the place of God; she attempts to recount all the events of the Bible in their proper order. Framing her memory of the book as a vast field of text (exhibited as if it were a picture, which in a way it is), she responds to a venerable Christian perspective: the idea that the minutely unfolding history of humanity is glimpsed in the blink of an eye by the watchful deity. But this is also, of course, the believer’s fondest desire: a Book so intimately read and recalled that it would float before one’s eyes at all times, a constant written reminder, to be quoted or cited at will. At the same time, like the real thing, Kay’s Bible is an unruly mass of individual narratives which the printed text tries to amalgamate and control by numbering each fragment.
In Kay’s version, which turns the literal word into fugitive stories, the order is untenable. Bits break off and drift about, coming to rest in entirely the wrong place. The Old Testament begins with a passage from the Gospel of St John (’In the beginning was the word’) and crucial chronologies get upended: ‘David the giant killer was the son of someone famous, and the father of Solomon or the other way around.’ The illogic of pure enumeration leads the artist to draw up a new and quite demented catalogue: The Bible – 2,717 Objects in Order of Appearance might be an index to the actual book, were it not that its order is unfathomable, and the whole riddled with omissions and repetitions. In Kay’s rendering, ‘1,000 silver shekels’ abut meaninglessly against ‘400 silver shekels’: the general category disappears and is replaced by a series of untraceable instances of the same thing. (Of course, as Borges’s Funes would insist, there is no such thing as ‘the same thing’; each appearance is a separate memory deserving of its own entry in the catalogue.) The list of objects – saddle, stone, stones, another hundred pieces of silver, tent, altar, idols, earrings – tells us everything and nothing. As a way of making sense of the Bible, it is extremely impressive and quite useless.
Any inventory, no matter how thorough, is only ever a partial record of a more chaotic and expansive reality. I know it is fanciful to imagine that I could corral my own past into a comprehensive archive of meaningful artifacts. The real meaning of these few frail objects in front of me lies not
in what they tell me about the past, but in their simple and largely accidental survival. It is the fact that they are still with me that matters, and each one deserves to be as carefully mounted and labelled as if it were an example plucked from the richest hoard.
¶ Reservoir
Putting aside my mother’s Bible and its contents with a final glance at the still-harrowing state of her handwriting, I have a clear image of the pen she must have used. A blue and silver ballpoint, slimly tapered and clipless (a ‘lady’s pen’), it always seemed to me a perfectly refined instrument. It was not only the delicate barrel, decorated with a constellation of tiny white stars, that intrigued me, but most of all the mystery of its mechanism. A darker cylinder of blue at the end twisted only very slightly to reveal the point, and I never failed to notice, when the pen appeared from my mother’s handbag, that this simple turn, executed with one hand, seemed to set it off from all other, cruder, examples. I coveted it for years, until one Christmas (I was twelve, and already, in the depths of that winter, my mother’s frozen hand must have held her pen with slightly less assurance than before) I decided that I wanted one too. The gift required a trip to a shopping centre a few miles away; I hadn’t told my mother that I wanted her pen exactly, but when we arrived at the stationer’s counter, there it was: a green twin to my mother’s blue.