One of the pleasures of Bernadette Mayer’s Memory project is its play between the fragmentary sensory inputs of memory and the elusive totality of biography. The piece, created over the course of one month in July 1971, is multimodal. On each day of that July, Mayer shot one roll (36 exposures) of 35mm film and created corresponding audio recordings. At the end of the month, she used both the snapshots and the audio recordings to recreate a 30-day journal of her experiences. In 1972, the resulting photographs were exhibited in an art gallery along with the recordings and finally, in 1975, Memory (the book) with the text reworked and the images omitted was published. Mayer’s journal entries are moment-by-moment dissections of each day in the form of Gertrude Stein-like prose poems. “You know,” says Bernadette Mayer in a 2017 interview with the Brooklyn Rail, “I read something that I must have said in the past—that if you were surrounded by my memories and my voice saying what I did that you might actually become me.”
From Memory by Bernadette Mayer, Siglio, 2020. Courtesy Bernadette Mayer Papers, Special Collections & Archives, University of California, San Diego.
As one looks through the newly published Siglio edition, which brings the text and images together in print for the first time, one can’t help but at once become overwhelmed with the magnitude of the project (there are over eleven-hundred snapshots mostly arranged nine to a page) as well as to get lost in its intricate details. On one page, for example, there are two snapshots of a parked New York City yellow cab from different angles, a picture of people grocery shopping, what amounts to a 1970s-style selfie of the author, a snapshot of a man making his way down the street on a bicycle, a faded shop sign behind him that says Bazaar, a fire hydrant, and a random city scene with people gathered under the striped umbrella of a hot dog stand. There are countless pictures of cars from the 1950s and 1960s, some stopped in traffic and some in transit and an equal number of pictures of apartment buildings, the trees in front of apartment buildings and fire escapes. There are also pictures of lush green plants, muted scenes from inside diners, pool halls and bars as well as mesmerizing pictures of a road trip from New York City to Massachusetts.
Mayer’s snapshots are a Kodachrome constellation of the interiors and exteriors of New York City fifty years ago, a world gradually being lost to another century. The snapshots with their oversaturated blues and reds are inseparable from the time period in which they were produced. No one would look at these photos and believe that they were made at any other time than when they were made: they are not merely reproductions of the early 1970s, they are the 1970s. Snapshots record the ephemeral, include that which might normally have been edited out (the peripheral)—laundry, clouds, empty highways, city buses, a light fixture above someone playing pool—that which should be lost to time, not captured eternally in “high” art. Ironically, though, it is precisely the snapshot’s insistence on imperfection, its resistance to timelessness, that gives the overall project, with its excess of dailiness, its close attention to the overlooked, an avant-garde sensibility that no Instagram filter could come close to replicating. In that regard, the images, taken together, also produce a sense of this time period’s cultural norms with respect to leisure and work. Thus, the project ventures beyond merely personal memories and moves into a collective cultural memory of this era—the streets of New York City fifty years ago when time itself felt distinctly different from how it feels today.
At once, we also see the dehumanizing regimentation of personalized technology. Indeed, the book obsessively interrogates the intersection between time and the technology used to document it, technology to us that seems particularly dated (35mm film, Xerox machines, tape recorders and typewriters). The language used in the journals traces this obsession: there are over two-hundred instances where the word “time” is used; “day” is used almost four-hundred times, and words like “camera” and “electric,” and “machine,” appear repeatedly. Having left New York City, Mayer and her friends arrive at a country house in Massachusetts. On July 11th, they are setting up a tripod in the middle of a river:
There are feats, the feats: walking in the stream like astronauts then seven hours of work at the typewriter & we wind up faking it & we've been here a week & it seems like a week & there'd be food for him wherever he happened to go, house down low some farm form of alliance I see between you & me do you understand everything & how so what comes later but come on stronger, camouflage? laziness, ridiculous, wrong words but many of them traveling traveling on a train you take your time, infected foot your foot could write a boot about you, why not, get it? We were in the forest mounds we were in the forest rounds but never deep deep deep breathes & more than fashions leave, how many days will it take to tell the time, get back maybe to somewhere I was before, back to where we both began, these dragged out days…
From Memory by Bernadette Mayer, Siglio, 2020. Courtesy Bernadette Mayer Papers, Special Collections & Archives, University of California, San Diego.
When Mayer asks, “how many days will it take to tell the time?” the answer is fluid. Sometimes a week actually “seems like a week,” and at other times the days are “dragged out.” Language, like the river flowing around the legs of the tripod, is that amorphous stream of consciousness “traveling traveling,” with little to stop it. There’s no way to “get back maybe to somewhere [she] was before,” no matter how many photos are taken, no matter how many words recorded.
Memory was written when the long postwar economic boom was ending. Not only were corporate rates of profit beginning to fall but between 1970 and 1975, the city lost around 85,000 residents per year. This was an era of slow decline leading to the 1974 fiscal crisis when New York City was at serious risk of going bankrupt. Across the board, this meant social spending in the city was cut drastically. By 1974, city officials met with banks which ultimately led to a bail out setting in motion a template of debt and neoliberal austerity that is commonplace today. The socio-political moment of this project is important to understanding its form:
Lights. Lights all electric electric machines. This is an excuse. This is a prescription. The f/stop is the ratio between the length of the lens to the diameter of the opening it has less to do with you than with light. No dreams. Typewriter tensor light slide projector tape recorder holly in an electric red dress under electric light library light electric coffee cups from china, we sense the presence of something from china real ice july too do you do you know what i mean new ribbons roll into the library on ice to pick up film, daze fantasy patron with one roll shot, i put one in from the bag of film & shoot & still the ribbon with the hole in it talking to everything: will this be something: earlier later top bottom in out gertrude stein & emily dickinson on the stamp on heroin, ed working & going to toronto tomorrow, something to put together & more memory into a schedule of light…
Here we see a larger system of thought, meditation and perception characterized by intercutting. This is a system broken down and spliced back together by machines, a process which is both “excuse” and “prescription.” Like the privatization and selling off of parts of the public, this formation is simultaneously the way forward yet ultimately leads to collapse. Memory isn’t light, it’s a “schedule” of light—an arrangement timed and chronicled through mechanization.
From Memory by Bernadette Mayer, Siglio, 2020. Courtesy Bernadette Mayer Papers, Special Collections & Archives, University of California, San Diego.
Sensory memory, the raw data of perception, decays very quickly after it is perceived. It is what we pay attention to that ultimately matters in the creation of long-term memory and long-term memory is central to how we forge biographical narratives. A contemporaneous investigation into the aesthetics of memory is Joe Brainard’s fascinating book, I Remember, first published in 1971. In Brainard’s book, the techniques of splicing and piling-up of language share a deep connection to Mayer’s work: “I remember the only time I ever saw my mother cry. I was eating apricot pie / I remember how much I used to stutter. / I remember the first time I saw television. Lucille Ball was taking ballet lessons.” Through the use of anaphora and the list form, I Remember thinks through the idiosyncratic nature of memory by looking at how individual memories don’t solidify into a tidy, biographical narrative. Like Memory, I Remember insists much more on the difficulty of assimilating parts to create a biographical whole, rather than shaping a cogent narrative. Like Mayer’s snapshots, Brainard’s piling-up of memories doesn’t get us much closer to having a more complete understanding of his life. Both books betray the weirdness of how a person constructs their own life stories from parts that often feel incredibly disparate.
Mayer’s assertion that a person could become Bernadette Mayer by immersing in the raw data of her memories, we know, could never be. A person and their corresponding memories, however close to the raw material, will always remain somewhat alien, perhaps most of all to the artist herself. In 2017, when Mayer was asked about the overexposed reds and blues of the original Kodachrome photos fading, almost fifty years later, she joked that “it makes her feel old” and then said, “I’m older than memory.”
Sandra Simonds is an award-winning author of seven books of poetry, including Atopia (Wesleyan University Press 2019). Her poems have been published in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Poetry, and elsewhere. Follow her on Twitter @sandmansimonds
Banner: Memory by Bernadette Mayer, Siglio, 2020. Courtesy Bernadette Mayer Papers, Special Collections & Archives, University of California, San Diego.
From Memory by Bernadette Mayer, Siglio, 2020. Courtesy Bernadette Mayer Papers, Special Collections & Archives, University of California, San Diego.