New Memory
Whenever the notification comes up - ‘You have a new memory’ - it is an interruption, but I’m curious, too, to see what has been selected for me. People and pets, travel, occasionally landscapes (‘Golden Hour Over the Years’) but never objects, even though they are the key to many of my memories. Perhaps the photographs themselves are the objects, with their boundaries, their insides and outsides.
Inside, a stretch of pavement, grey and stained, and my shadow, holding up the camera. Outside the frame, the street in SoHo, New York, last October, on the day I experimented with the method Bernadette Mayer devised in Memory. Every day for the month of July 1971 she took a roll of film, 36 photographs. She combined the photographs with an accompanying text that recounted her experiences on each day, based on her journals and writing triggered by her viewing the photos.
In an interview from 2017, Mayer said, about Memory: ‘After I did it, years went by, and I thought, it’s odd that nobody else has done it.” And so I decided to try, to spend a day tracing Bernadette Mayer’s life in New York, using the method that she had devised.
Later, viewing the photos, I found them to be a surprising, discontinous record of moments from that day, alchemised onto the film. The photographs and my writing from that day make up my essay, ‘Enduring Present’, now published in the new issue of HEAT magazine.
Object of the Month: (in which I expand on some of the objects I write about in Calendar)
Memory Game
In this game, the object is to collect matching pairs of images. You first place the cards face down, and then, when it’s your turn, you flip two over to see if they make a match. If they do, you take them, if not, you turn them back over, trying to remember the positions of each card, for your next turn.
The games brand Ravensburger hold the rights for calling the game ‘Memory’, which is almost as odd to me as my phone telling me I have a new memory. The game itself has existed in many different versions: a centuries-old Japanese game with pictures painted inside of shells, or a similar matching game that uses playing cards instead.
In Calendar, the Memory Game comes linked to my childhood memory of playing it. “This is the only game I ever feel compelled to win,” I write in the story about it, which was true, then, or at least, I don’t remember feeling very competitive about any other gamess. I liked puzzles better, assembling something rather than racing.
Object Project
Since I started this month’s newsletter with Bernadette Mayer, I thought I’d share my favourite passage from her poem Midwinter Day for this month’s object project. She wrote Midwinter Day over one day in December, 1978, the winter solstice. A book-length poem in six parts, it traces her day from recounting her dreams, into what Alice Notley (who, sadly, passed away earlier this week) described as ‘an epic poem about a daily routine’. The poem follows Mayer’s day at home with her children, their trip to the library, then back home and through chores, conversations, and reflections, the flow of life from moment to moment.
My favourite passage is from the start of part two, a description of the house through a list of everything in it. This page from it describes the pictures on the walls, the children’s toys, a calendar, a world map, “vinegar, garbage”:
Every December, there are regular annual readings of Midwinter Day. In one reading that took place over Zoom in 2021, I enjoy the details of how the ginger cat is unwilling to leave the screen in the first minute, and then later that Mayer’s daughter Marie reads the description of her childhood tantrum (at 1:46:00 - ‘In which the pitch of the tones of her loudest screams/Is like an electrically driven car to the consisten sun’s/Hottest spots).
Here in the southern hemisphere, our winter solstice is on Saturday 21st June. This is when I will write to you again.
Vanessa.
For more information about Calendar, and to preorder it: https://upswellpublishing.com/product/calendar
Object Encounter
Lovely lovely lovely. ❤️