Ongoingness

by Sarah Manguso

  I still needed to record the present moment before I could enter the next one, but I wanted to know how to inhabit time in a way that wasn’t a character flaw.

  Remember the lessons of the past. Imagine the possibilities of the future. And attend to the present, the only part of time that doesn’t require the use of memory. ♦

  Sensory memory lasts about two hundred to five hundred milliseconds after perception. Then it starts to degrade.

  Working memory, or short-term memory, allows recall for a period of several seconds to a minute.

  Long-term memory can store larger quantities of information for a longer duration, potentially until the end of life. It may be divided into procedural memory, used in learning motor skills, and declarative memory, used in conscious recall.

  Declarative memory may be further subdivided into what scientists call semantic memory, which concerns facts taken independent of context, and episodic memory, which concerns personal experiences that occurred at a particular time and place.

  Autobiographical memory is generally viewed as equivalent to episodic memory.

  I record these facts dutifully, as if they dignify this writing with something more real than my memories—as if they reveal. ♦

  The least contaminated memory might exist in the brain of a patient with amnesia—in the brain of someone who cannot contaminate it by remembering it. With each recollection, the memory of it further degrades. The memory and maybe the fact of every kiss start disappearing the moment the two mouths part. ♦

  If I considered the act of procreation as essential to the world’s general ongoingness, I could almost accept it as an obligation of being alive.

  I believed that parturition would honor the force that, in the nineteenth century, joined my earliest ancestors I know by name, and the forces joining anonymous procreators for centuries and centuries before that, and so on back to the beginning, to the first sexually differentiated animals.

  And then, someday, maybe, someone will have needed me to produce one of their ancestors, and that fact of my parturition, that fact and my name, will be the last anyone remembers of me. All the rest of me will be gone, no longer anyone’s burden. ♦

  When my grandfather got old, he started emptying the apartment he shared with my demented grandmother. Or maybe these events happened coincidentally.

  He didn’t throw anything away. He drove it the quarter mile to my parents’ place—one day a stack of moisture-warped paperbacks, one day a box of colored pencils, and so on. They kept some of it. His things, at least, would keep going after he ended.

  When they got old, my parents started emptying their own apartment. They’re selling their things on the internet. I don’t know where anything is going.

  I knew I was grown up when I spent time with them and felt not just the weight of my old memories but the weight of theirs, from when they were children. ♦

  When I’m back with my own memories I drink a glass of wine or a cup of coffee. It helps soften their pressure, but the effect fades. Then I think I should practice grace for what I’ve been given to remember, but whatever I do, I can’t seem to forget what I want to forget.

  And then I think I don’t need to write anything down ever again. Nothing’s gone, not really. Everything that’s ever happened has left its little wound. ♦

  For most of my life I claimed that my earliest memory took place in a corner of the kitchen. I stood at the counter, knowing I’d be scolded for having taken cookies from the cookie jar. But of course that wasn’t the first thing my brain learned and kept.

  If I’m to believe the child-care books, the first thing I learned and kept was the identity of my mother. ♦

  I remember being three, standing at eye level with the drawer in my mother’s night table, the white porcelain knob pierced by a tarnished screw, saying When am I ever going to be four?

  When I was four I went with a group of children into a nature preserve, where someone pointed out items of interest.

  With great excitement he reported the discovery of a lady’s slipper, a highly endangered thing.

  Each child was led to an opening in the bramble. High branches shaded us.

  I was led to the opening. A hand must have pointed to a bloom, but I didn’t know to look for a flower. I stood, solemn, seeing nothing, brooding on the phrase lady’s slipper, wondering what it was. I never saw it. The mystery was enough. It was better. Then I moved aside for the next child. ♦

  When I was twelve I realized that photographs were ruining my memory. I’d study the photos from an event and gradually forget everything that had happened between the shutter openings. I couldn’t tolerate so much lost memory, and I didn’t want to spectate my life through a viewfinder, so I stopped taking photographs. All the snapshots of my life for the next twenty years were shot by someone else. There aren’t many, but there are enough. ♦

  When I was fourteen, it was cloudy on the night I looked through a telescope at the comet. I’ll see it when I’m eighty-seven, I thought on the way home, not caring. ♦

  When I was twenty-three I began seeing a psychotherapist because I couldn’t bear the idea that, after the end of an affair, all our shared memories might be expunged from the mind of the other, that they might no longer exist outside my own belief they’d happened.

  I couldn’t accept the possibility of being the only one who would remember everything about those moments as carefully as I tried to remember them.

  My life, which exists mostly in the memories of the people I’ve known, is deteriorating at the rate of physiological decay. A color, a sensation, the way someone said a single word—soon it will all be gone. In a hundred and fifty years no one alive will ever have known me.

  Being forgotten like that, entering that great and ongoing blank, seems more like death than death. ♦

  Maybe the best way to remember anything accurately is to write it down and forget it, and then, only at the last moment of your life, to recall it—like listening to a broken tape by hand-feeding it one last time through the tape player.

  During the age of the cassette tape, it seemed that everyone was talking about doing that. It was always some high romantic tale, the only live recording of a secret show or the last letter from a long-lost friend.

  I never did it. Maybe everyone was lying. No matter. It’s still a decent metaphor. ♦

  Could I claim a memory even if I couldn’t access it via language? Or was I writing as if it never had happened?

  I didn’t mind that perception is partial or that recollection is worse, but I minded that I didn’t know why I remembered what I remembered—or why I thought I remembered what I remembered. ♦

  I assumed that maximizing the breadth and depth of my autobiographical memory would be good for me, force me to write and live with greater care, but in the last thing one writer ever published, when he was almost ninety years old, he wrote a terrible warning.

  He said he’d liked remembering almost as much as he’d liked living but that in his old age, if he indulged in certain nostalgias, he would get lost in his memories. He’d have to wander them all night until morning.

  He responded to my fan letter when he was ninety. When he was ninety-one, he died.

  I just wanted to retain the whole memory of my life, to control the itinerary of my visitations, and to forget what I wanted to forget.

  Good luck with that, whispered the dead. ♦

  The experiences that demanded I yield control to a force greater than my will—diagnoses, deaths, unbreakable vows—weren’t the beginnings or the ends of anything. They were the moments when I was forced to admit that beginnings and ends are illusory. That history doesn’t begin or end, but it continues.

  For just a moment, with great effort, I could imagine my will as a force that would not disappear but redistribute when I died, and that all life contained the same force, and that I needn’t worry about my impending death because the great responsibility of my life was to contain the force for a
while and then relinquish it.

  Then the moment would pass, and I’d return to brooding about my lost memories. ♦

  Lives stop, but life keeps going. Flesh begets flesh.

  Great cathedrals were built by generations of stonemasons to whom the architect was a man who might once have greeted their grandfathers’ grandfathers. How agreeable, then, to believe in God.

  To set stones on stones not for the architect but for eternity.

  The Latin epitaph in one seventeenth-century cathedral translates: Reader, if you seek his monument, look around you.

  The words are carved in a disk of black marble set beneath the center of the dome. The disk was placed there by the architect’s son.

  It’s easy to imagine the great man, but try to imagine the son who knows his father’s cathedral will be loved longer than the flesh of his flesh. ♦

  The oldest known cave paintings are thirty thousand years old. Along with abstract markings and pictures of animals, they include images of human hands.

  It seems that the painters pressed their hands against the walls, blew pigment from their mouths onto the walls, and then lifted their hands away.

  Then they walked out of the cave, marked with red ochre from fingertip to wrist.

  The catalog of emotion that disappears when someone dies, and the degree to which we rely on a few people to record something of what life was to them, is almost too much to bear. ♦

  Another friend inherited a collection of ceramic bowls that used to belong to her great-great-great-grandmother. I like the fact that they break, she said, so that I can glue them back together.

  Before my husband went into surgery to have his shattered nose reconstructed, the anesthesiologist told us she’d give him a benzodiazepine intravenously.

  It causes anterograde amnesia, so when my husband whispered I love you directly into my ear, I whispered back, You aren’t going to remember this. ♦

  When I became pregnant I struck something mortally. Not just myself, symbolically; my son, actually.

  The partly made flesh wriggling inside me was already mortal. ♦

  During my pregnancy I couldn’t remember anything. Information seemed to enter my memory and dissolve.

  The diary was of no help.

  Emerging from the sickening exhaustion of the first few months, I began to see the work I might do next—this, an assemblage of already exploded bits that cohere anyway, a reminder that what seems a violent interruption seldom is. ♦

  Goldfish are said to possess legendarily short memory spans, but in fact they can recall information—such as certain sounds—for up to five months, or so one report claims.

  I’m told that even a newborn, in its first months outside its mother’s body, remembers the underwater sounds of the womb. ♦

  I developed the amnesia that some people call pregnancy brain.

  Heavily pregnant when I heard my friend’s father had died two years earlier, I sent condolences at once, hysterically sorry. My friend wrote back. I’d sent a letter two years earlier. I didn’t remember sending it.

  Then another friend told me his apartment had been burgled. How lucky that the dog wasn’t hurt! I wrote back. He’d put the dog down months before. I hadn’t remembered that, either.

  I scrambled to remember the dead in order—of course an eighteenth-century composer was dead, and all the people who died before I was born. My grandparents all were dead. Recent deaths of those I knew only by their work—a novelist, a monologist. I remembered which of my friends were dead. Another friend’s stepmother, in a coma for years, had died earlier that year. Good, I thought, I haven’t forgotten them all. ♦

  When I was almost nine months pregnant, my mother-in-law began receiving hospice care.

  My doctor wouldn’t permit me to cross the ocean to see her. My husband didn’t want to miss the birth of our son. And he didn’t want to miss the death of his mother, the woman who raised him.

  I drank quarts of raspberry-leaf tea, trying to trigger early labor.

  Six thousand five hundred miles away from each other, two unplannable moments prepared themselves.

  My husband’s phone rang. It was his stepsister, calling from his mother’s hospital room. Yes, he said. A few moments later he said, Hi, Mom! I hadn’t heard him say it for days. My heart beat hard, as if it knew. ♦

  My husband photographs everything: bound hanks of insulated wire on the train platform, clouds at sunset out the jet window, the shape of my foot as I sleep.

  When he was fired from his job, he cleared off his hard drives. Then he gave back the company’s computers. That night he discovered he’d forgotten to copy the last photographs he’d ever taken of his mother.

  In one of the lost photographs, she holds her head in her hand. She turns toward the glass doors that open onto the porch over the canal. She is skeletal, her body no longer able to derive nutrition from food.

  She looks uncharacteristically hopeless, as if the picture represented the moment that she, who had outlived her sudden-death prognosis by five years, would not go on. ♦

  She was given twenty-four hours to live on the day I was told my cervix was 50 percent effaced.

  Three weeks before her only grandchild was born, she joined her old horse, who had fallen suddenly ill only months before and was awaiting her patiently in the earth. ♦

  Then I became a mother. I began to inhabit time differently. It had something to do with mortality. I kept writing the diary, but my worry about the lost memories began to subside. ♦

  Nursing an infant creates so much lost, empty time. Of the baby’s nighttime feeds I remember nothing. Of his daytime feeds I remember almost nothing.

  It was a different nothing from the unrecorded nothing of the years before; this new nothing was absent of subjective experience. I was either asleep or almost asleep at all times.

  Day and night consisted of the input and output of milk, often in an emergency, but the emergencies all resembled each other. At dawn I noticed a pile of tiny damp blankets and tiny damp clothes on the nursery floor, but I never remembered replacing the green shirt with the yellow one.

  In my experience nursing is waiting. The mother becomes the background against which the baby lives, becomes time.

  I used to exist against the continuity of time. Then I became the baby’s continuity, a background of ongoing time for him to live against. I was the warmth and milk that was always there for him, the agent of comfort that was always there for him.

  My body, my life, became the landscape of my son’s life. I am no longer merely a thing living in the world; I am a world. ♦

  In my twenties I stopped to write every time I happened upon beauty. It was an old-fashioned project. Romances were examined in detail. Each one was new.

  My thirties were filled not by romance but by other writing. In the diary I logged the words I wrote and the light or heavy passes I took through existing manuscripts. Virtuous activities such as exercise and housekeeping also were logged. The rhapsodies of the previous decade thinned out.

  Toward the end of my thirties and into my forties, entries became further abbreviated. Most of the sentences started with verbs. I is omitted from as many sentences as possible, occurring only for emphasis. I logged work and health—symptoms, medications, side effects. Housekeeping was no longer noted. If I read or looked at or heard something extraordinary, I named it, but as one ages, fewer things fall into this category. Reflection disappeared almost completely.

  Of a concert by a band I’ve liked for almost twenty years, listened to most recently about five years ago, but never seen live until this week, I wrote only Still know every word. Twenty years ago, the sentence would have been twenty sentences.

  Though I try to log only the first time he does yet another extraordinary thing, the diary is now mostly about my son. ♦

  Sometimes the baby fed at seven thirty and cried until feeding again at eight thirty.

  My life had been replaced with a mute ability t
o wait for the next minute, the next hour.

  I had no thoughts, no self-awareness, just an ability to sit with a little creature who screamed and screamed.

  Waiting for the baby to feed or stop feeding or burp or pass wind or yellow liquid shit I postponed showers, phone calls, bowel movements. I ignored correspondence because I had no energy even to say I am so tired, and no one cared that I was tired—who isn’t tired? Before I had the baby I remember feeling tired all the time. But after he joined me I could spend four days in two rooms, pajama-clad, so tired I was almost blind. ♦

  I used to be twenty. Then I was twenty-one, twenty-two, and so on. And then I became a mother and could no longer even distinguish the difference between twenty-one and twenty-two or the difference between thirty-eight and thirty-nine.

  I was at once softer and harder. The hardness was a capacity for pain that would otherwise have interrupted the soft, almost bodiless calm in which I held the baby. ♦

  Soon after his mother died, my husband’s dead father’s best friend’s ex-wife died. The best friend is the only one left. My husband said the man’s name. That leaves him, my husband said. That leaves him, of the people who have known me since I was born. And then my childhood will be truly gone. ♦