Memories Can’t Wait: Thinking Through Material Affects
By 1240 Writing Resident; Anton Stuebner
This is an essay about the uncanny, and how an occurrence or exchange can unwittingly — but presciently — prepare someone for a major event. It’s also a reflection on, yet again, how a series of seemingly false starts can lead to productive divergences and unanticipated breakthroughs.
I initially wanted to write an essay about my Grandma Bernice, who I never met (she died when my mother was fourteen), but who was a distinctly important “figure” in my life. The word figure is apt here, since my primary consciousness of her came through family stories, and a portrait of her from the late 1930s. Bernice is probably 19 or 20 in the black-and-white photo, a promotional shot from her then-nascent dance and burlesque career in Chicago (figure 1). She gazes at the camera in a cutaway sequin top and skirt, her left hand resting firmly on her hip, her right arm grasping a twisted iron fixture that’s incongruously ornate in the spare, concrete floored studio.
I always found that gaze more arresting than the suggestive dress, especially since it felt both very direct and intuitively familiar. A lot of this has to do with family resemblance — she has the same eyes as my mother, my sister, and me — and my mother’s stories, which made Bernice a vital presence in my life. But there’s something else about the photograph itself which drew me in, but which was always difficult to discern: a shimmering glamorousness that felt both unmistakably adult and decidedly outside of my suburban frame of reference as a kid.
I also correlated that allure — and those shimmering sequins — with a kind of innate queerness: self-expression through an almost high-camp aesthetic. Years later, I’d find out that my grandparents met on a double date with their respective same-sex partners. There’s no way that I could “identify” my grandmother as queer, I’d later tell myself, by simply looking at her photo.
And yet…something in the affective qualities of that photo triggered an acute pang of recognition, which seemed unknowable at that time, but was still deeply felt. In exploring that relationship between feeling and knowledge (or lack thereof), I kept returning to the opening pages of Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (2015):
“I had spent a lifetime devoted to Wittgenstein’s idea that the inexpressible is contained — inexpressibly! — in the expressed…Its paradox is, quite literally, why I write, or how I feel able to keep writing. For it doesn’t feed or exalt any angst one may feel about the incapacity to express, in words, that which eludes them. It doesn’t punish what can be said for what, by definition, it cannot be.”[1]
Last fall, I was at a dinner with colleagues when a then-new friend asked me about my “origin story.” I shared the photo of Bernice, told a few well-loved stories, and discussed a recent essay for this site about The Crying Game, and the significance of works that generate an emotional response that defy easy explanation. She pulled up the essay on her phone, read through it, looked again at the photo of Bernice, and said that it all “made sense”: that the image of Dil (Jaye Davidson) in The Crying Game — in her gold and candy-color swirled sequined dress — must’ve resonated with me because it reminded me of Bernice’s photo, which I saw every day as I walked down the hallway from the front door of my family’s house (figure 2).
I sat there with my mouth agape, stunned that I hadn’t made the connection before. It was perceptive, intuitive, and smart. I thanked her, jotted a few notes, and told myself that I’d explore those interconnections the moment that I could get away to my studio.
And then I didn’t.
I recently looked through my files and found a draft from March 2018, where I’d attempted to corral some rough ideas and through-lines into a “meditation on identity and misrecognition.” Revisiting it, I immediately realized why I abandoned it: the prose was self-consciously arch, circling around some larger questions (my interactions to Bernice’s personal effects, and how that impacted my sense of self and relationship to genealogies) without getting to the core.
And then life happened. I stopped writing.
This isn’t exactly true. In fact, I was constantly writing for work, compiling press releases, editing grant applications and exhibition collateral. But my own writing came to a standstill. It wasn’t so much as if I was experiencing a “writer’s block.” I just needed more time to connect these ideas, and to see what came out on the other side.
In Spring 2018, I began collaborating with friends and colleagues to see what insights emerged through our collective efforts. I worked on a series of visual/text responses with artist Leigh Wells as a way of thinking through some recurring ideas and investigations into hauntings. Around the same time, I assisted Frish Brandt, a friend and colleague, with a letter-writing workshop during Reimagine, a city-wide festival of lectures, programs, and events about rethinking cultural dialogues on death. I even curated an exhibition at Catharine Clark Gallery that considered how narrative provides tools for navigating difficult moments in our lives. These weren’t intended as distractions from writing, but they did give me space to experiment and explore ideas before revisiting that draft from March, which I still wanted to turn into something.
And then life happened.
My mother-in-law died two weeks ago, and in sorting through her personal effects, I began to think about inheritance, and the stuff that we leave behind. I didn’t expect to feel an immediate connection to, say, her dishware sets, or a crystal bowl. These were inanimate objects, after all, that didn’t reflect the life of the person who possessed them. Or so I assumed. But each time I pick up something — or see that crystal bowl on our dining room table, where it is now sitting — I can’t deny that there’s a presence…or a sensation that feels like a presence, a faint warmth that feels as if it’s imprinted.
I returned to work after taking a few days off to support my family. As I tried to sort through my emotional responses from the previous weeks, I kept returning to two installations at the gallery: a site specific sculpture by Katherine Vetne, Guilty Pleasure (2018), comprised of 70 pieces of melted Avon lead crystal on charcoal grey pedestals (figure 3); and a triptych of photographs from Sophie Calle’s The Graves (1991), shot during a road trip across the United States during which Calle photographed headstones without names but with anonymous familial affiliations, such as “father, mother, son” (figure 4). I began thinking about how, in a neoliberal society, a person’s life is quantified by its “stuff “ — the china sets, the furniture, the bedding folded in the linen closet.
As I thought about the relationship between accumulation and inheritance, however, I also considered a related, but possibly inverse, proposition: that in a world where everything is so atomized and diffuse, our material possessions become “vessels” that, through years of use and embodied encounter, are impressed with some core part of ourselves — possibly an energy — that continues to reverberate after we are gone. Many thinkers and artists have worked through this idea: the artist Indira Allegra (a friend, a fellow 1240 Minnesota Street Resident and recent TOSA Studio Award recipient), for example, produces stunning and heartbreaking work about material affects, and how cloth can hold tension, memory, and trauma related to violence against vulnerable populations (figure 5). Indira, in particular, has been an extraordinary teacher who has put me in closer touch with a practice of embodied perception, a mode of experiential learning that I hope to explore further on this platform.
In reflecting on the experiences of the last few months — and the work that came out of collaborations and exercises that I originally thought were divergent from my writing practice — I began to recognize that I’d become equipped, unexpectedly, with a set of critical tools that helped me to not only navigate through grief, but to hold space for that moment when I’d be ready to articulate feeling and thought.
And then I started to write.
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[1] Nelson, Maggie. The Argonauts. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2015. 5.
