memory is our business
When she told me that she had asked her brother to destroy the tape, I was surprised. I thought she should keep it. My response was archivistic and selfish, born out of a belief that the recorded matter of the world is worth saving, as well as a feeling that such matter, once assembled, might help me better know myself. This was an artifact; this was evidence. This was a singular thing. And it had to do, however indirectly, with me.
I think she was taken aback that I wanted to keep it. I should have stopped for a second to imagine the agony of hearing yourself speak for the first time into an absence that would remain for the rest of your life. But the archival sensibility often overlooks possibilities of pain in the name of stewardship and self-discovery.
She asked her brother to get rid of the tape and he did. She felt that the way she sounded on the tape betrayed how she felt at the time: despite her dread, she had attempted to sound cheerful. There was too much dissonance between how she sounded and how she remembered feeling, between the object and the memory it held.
I did ask my uncle for my grandfather’s answering machine recording, which he emailed to me:
Hi, this is Bill H—. I am out of the office at the present time, but I will be back some time this afternoon. If you would care to, would you please leave your name and telephone number and a brief message and I will return your call as soon as possible. Thank you for calling. Remember, wait until the tone. Thank you.
I wait until the tone. The tone sounds. It is the first time I have ever heard his voice.
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When I was a child, I remember my parents sitting on the floor watching a news program about Flight 93. Perhaps it was just my dad; my mom has no memory of it. It was playing voicemails from the doomed flight, passengers sending last words of love to those on the ground before heroically downing the plane. Mostly I just wanted to say I love you — and — I’m going to miss you — and — and please give my love to Mom and Dad and — mostly I just love you and I just wanted to tell you that — I don’t know if I’m going to get the chance to tell you that again or not —
My parents had tears in their eyes. I was terrified. They noticed me and turned the television off. It was the first time I’d heard anything like it.
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Today, on the twentieth anniversary of the September 11 attacks, President Biden is in a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, where Flight 93 disappeared into the earth. I am watching a C-SPAN livestream. The video is shaky and shot from a distance, as only family members of the victims are allowed on the part of the field, called the Sacred Ground, where the plane hit. The audio is just white noise. You can make out the President amid a small group of people, all wearing masks.
Much of the commentary on the nature of the attacks, at the time and in the two decades since, has focused on the inability to fully grasp the catastrophe. The scale of ruin, the rupture of security, the surfeit of media coverage. It all created what Jacques Derrida called “this nonhorizon of knowledge (the powerlessness to comprehend, recognize, cognize, identify, name, describe, foresee).”
But part of it was the simple fact that there was nothing there to name. When the plane hit the field in Pennsylvania, it turned into vapor, into an enormous hole in the ground. Almost no remains were recovered. The event erased the stuff of its own happening. As Susie Linfield wrote, “September 11 was not only an unusual political event, but an unusual visual one too. There is little evidence of the dead, because most were burnt into dust: Ground Zero was a mass grave, but one without bodies.”
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It is rather shameful to speak of 9/11 as something that happened to me. 9/11 happened to Manhattan, to Arlington, to those aboard the four hijacked flights. It happened to the 2,982 people whose names they are reading aloud this morning, four miles from where I sit. And it has continued to happen: first responders and others are crippled or dead from the effects of toxic rubble.
I was in elementary school in North Carolina. I was seven. I was fine. And yet it acted on my life, on all our lives. Not only in the wars and surveillance that would follow but also in a feeling of powerlessness—to know, to name, to understand—that darkly mirrored the powerlessness already inherent to childhood. All coming of age is learning to navigate a confusing world; but after 9/11, the world did not feel knowable. Adults and authorities did not seem to know what it was at all. Worse was the rush to fill that void with incoherent, patriotic kitsch. When I think of 9/11, I don’t think of the day so much as the months and years that followed: riding in the backseat of my dad’s car, hearing Alan Jackson come on the country music station to sing about 9/11 and Jesus and not knowing where Iraq was.
Some of my friends remember seeing the towers fall on TV that day, either with their parents or at school; others remember their parents’ fear and panic. I just remember being herded into the library and leaving school early. At home my parents kept the newspapers away and the television off. When I asked my mom if she remembered deciding how to handle the tragedy, she told me:
I guess I thought you would come to us with questions, but as I look back on my own childhood, my parents also did some sheltering and I remember at age 10 picking up Life magazine and trying to understand what Kent State was […] I had trouble figuring out the Vietnam War. It was on the news every night but mom always had the news turned off while we were younger. So we did elect to shield you all from the images (since they were so disturbing), but didn’t mean to not talk about it over the years.
A few months or years later—I can’t remember—I opened a drawer in the house and found a copy of the Charlotte Observer from that day, the front page photo engulfed in black smoke. That was also a shock, part of a gradual reconstruction of disaster that, with each discovery, only became sadder and stranger. I experienced 9/11 less as an event than an effect. It haunted the idylls of suburbia like some dark misunderstanding. Our lives went on, enshadowed by its unseen aftermath.
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In the months after 9/11, Don DeLillo wrote an essay describing the fixation on random details of the day of the attacks:
The paper that came streaming out of the towers and drifted across the river to Brooklyn backyards, status reports, résumés, insurance forms. Sheets of paper driven into concrete, according to witnesses. […] These are among the smaller objects and more marginal stories in the sifted ruins of the day. We need them […] to set against the massive spectacle that continues to seem unmanageable, too powerful a thing to set into our frame of practiced response.
In the face of enormity, there is something in these smaller, material fragments that allows us to “make sense of things” without anything ever really making sense.
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Much of my job as a filmmaker is spent rummaging through dead people’s things; selecting and labeling them; asking after their provenance and rights; and converting them into filetypes that can then be edited, manipulated, and made into something else.
For instance: amidst the archives, here are words in red ink stamped onto an envelope: memory is our business. Part of the archival material we’ve amassed for my current documentary project, it is a letter from the offices of AMPEX corporation, an electronics company founded in 1944 that pioneered recording equipment and tape recorders.
A random letter from the early days of mass reproducibility, sent long ago and not to me, nonetheless sits before me. The words are stamped in red next to a postmark from the day before my mom was born: memory is our business. Time and happenstance have addressed it to me.
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In Technics and Time, his dense, three-volume opus that I have been slowly working my way through, Bernard Stiegler argues that technical objects—all this manmade stuff—are integral to the condition of being human. That they are not mere tools that we use but rather organized matter that determines us even as we determine it. Humans and technics, he claims, are “mutually constitutive”:
That which anticipates, desires, has agency, thinks, and understands, I have called the who. The supplement to the who, its pros-thesis, is its what. The who is nothing without the what, since they are in a transductive relation during the process of exteriorization that characterizes life; that is, a process of differentiation by which life proceeds by other means than life.
That may seem a tortured way of putting it, but I find helpful the notion of life proceeding by other means than life. It is everywhere apparent—throughout our daily lives, in my documentary work, in the artifacts and archives that find their way to us. Those archival objects are all part of what Stiegler calls the already-there,
the past that is mine but that I have nevertheless not lived, to which my sole access is through the traces left of that past. This means that there is no already-there, and therefore no relation to time, without artificial memory supports. The memory of the existence of the generations that preceded me, and without which I would be nothing, is bequeathed on such supports.
Our relationship to these “memory supports”—an old voicemail, for instance—is not merely instrumental but fundamental to our sense of time, and thus our sense of self.
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My dad’s parents—my other grandparents—lived long lives, well into their 90s. They passed away a few years ago of natural causes.
I have one voice recording of my paternal grandfather. Not from earlier, when he was eager to talk of the past, but from the end. From too late. We were visiting them and were getting ready to leave. My father, mother, brother, aunt, and cousin were all trying to figure out my grandmother’s prescriptions, while my grandfather mumbled things that, even replaying the recording, I cannot make out: “When you get to be 40 or 50, [inaudible] you’ll need to know or want to know [inaudible].”
The recording of him is a record of my failure to record. It is a recording not so much of him as the loss of him. It is proof of my neglect. And yet it remains precious, even as it is devoid of the meaning I had hoped it would contain.
I had a dream the summer after my grandfather died that I was holding him, cradling some depleted version of him. My eyes are tunnels, he kept saying. My eyes are tunnels. When I woke up it took me a minute to remember he was dead.
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At the 9/11 Memorial this morning, the likenesses of victims stare out from posters that the mourners have made, from t-shirts and pieces of paper. One woman, who lost both her father and her uncle twenty years ago, says: “There is a great hole in our family without you both.” The sister of Angel Perez, Jr., who also perished in the towers, holds back tears. “I see you in my dreams next to Mom,” she says, “I hear your laugh in my sons.” The woman standing next to her puts her hand on her back to comfort her. She says: “There will never be closure as we live to remember.”
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On the livestream from Shanksville, the president walks away from the camera, surrounded by men in suits and hats. They go through tall, yellowgreen grass like country priests departing a funeral. They walk for what seems like an eternity, past that pit of death now full of wildflowers, everyone matching the president’s halting step, as if in procession to some gilded by-and-by.
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There will never be closure as we live to remember. Memory is our business. Yesterday and today, writing this alone in my apartment, I begin to cry. I still don’t fully understand why.
Maybe the great mystery of the archive is in the kind of hurt it renders, by miracle but in pieces, through its retention of a past that cannot rescue or redeem us. It hurts because it is hardly something separate. It is a part of us, proof of us. It is already there.
Hi, this is Bill H—. I am out of the office at the present time, but I will be back some time this afternoon…
ben tapeworm