After Ebela “Mercy” Mensah
I stand in front of La Virgen del Tránsito. Mary’s steepled hands are gray. Her tight curls mirror the embroidery of her pillow. SENTENCE. A few of my friends pass by, making their way deeper into the closing museum, heading to the wing containing either modern or prehistoric Guatemalan art, which I cannot recall. I take in the sound of the expanded floorboards compressing together beneath their feet, and after some time, I follow them, the image of Mary departing also from my mind. (immaculate death, introduce now? but def break down later.)
At dinner, a steady creek of sickness washes through me. I am filled with a sense of apprehension incongruent with the day I have had, ill-fitting considering the love I feel for and from the people around me. (Consider adding: Later, I’ll think of how I should have remembered?) My thoughts are occupied by the set of flat chopsticks in my hand. I cannot manage to wield well enough to feed myself properly, and all that is legible to me is this supposed shortcoming, and the others it seems to recall.
What taught you shame? Because I remember that lightless summer, when the only brightness the house could muster poured in from outside its windows. It passed through the crack under the bathroom door and through the hole where the handle used to be. At night, we drew back the shower curtain blindly and rushed into the descending veil of cold, set loose on the world like bulls tearing madly through the gate. We laughed under these streams of water, and the droplets, saturated by the concentration of distant light, were made to look like shooting stars. Here too was the universe, born in a collapse that was void of light and heat.
Time, geography, and illness, I have watched all hasten their step in search of memory. VIGNETTE ABOUT GRANDMA ON THE COUCH? Yet if these things are the foot, then recollection is tripwire. (to make you aware you’ve strayed from some path? or something to that effect; break down/clarify further). If, taken on their own, these things seek to tamp down recollection, then it is through a process of remembrance, intentional or otherwise, that memory is reanimated and reconfigured.
Recollection through writing feels even more daunting. Failure to do something with these things. Inert. To either recollect actively or passively through an existence built off of many things. Introduction of shame, expectation, judgement, fantasy, other things I will have to be responsible for; the importation of BLANK.
I do not want to cannibalize memory with metaphor.
I want to talk about how this feels true for me and makes sense to me, how writing seems like the most possible world for memorial. I want to talk about how this, to me, feels like the logic of dispossession, of poverty, of migration and all its various afterlives, of illness.
I want to talk about trying to build a practice of writing and existing that isn’t hyper critical, doubtful, unreflecting, or reflecting to the point of paralysis or fetishization.
I want to integrate The Pastoral Clinic, section on guarding against forgetting as a result of personal and political fracturing.
I want to talk about how this feels true for me and makes sense to me, how writing seems like the most possible world for memorial. I want to talk about how this, to me, feels like the logic/natural progression of dispossession, of illness, of poverty, of migration and all its various afterlives.
AT THE SAME TIME, I DON’T WANT TO PUT THAT RESPONSIBILITY ON THIS THING OR EVEN ON MYSELF.
It is possible that these things are things that need repair and also are things that are resting states worthy of articulation and also are indescribable, forever beyond the reach of any system or vocabulary.
I want to talk about how I don’t want this to be all writing embodies for me. I don’t want to think of these things in past tense, through intellectualization, through metaphor. I don’t want the narrative distance to these worlds. I don’t want to feel like these things have to be useful to me for me to be in rooms with them. I don’t want to view these things as things to be cast off.
I want a more articulate relationship to these things, but this feels less and less possible by the day.
Under the weight of these expectations, my knowledge of these very things atrophies. Kept within my imagination, BLANK.
I will not make a spectacle of myself. I understand this (?this) to be a function of both my needs and my circumstances.
On the wall, I have printed out an exhibition guide which reads as follows: “good photographs provide insight into what can no longer be encountered physically in its exact form, guarding against an uncontoured, shapeless, and assumptive existence and remembrance of the past.” REVISITING MARY. IT FEELS LIKE THE PHONE CALL I MISSED.
Tributary. An ecstatic tradition.
Memories change hands with other memories, other belief systems and confusions, bartering. Hesitant to write and to live. Dangers of an immaculate existence. I have to speak not only to a past BLANK, but a present circumstance. IMMACULATE. Against martyrdom/self indulgence at getting it right.
I am the two inches of heaven above the tripwire and I am the two inches of hell beneath the foot. Where might be catharsis, instead is BLANK.
Without a practice, of creation, of remembrance, of affection, all things perish.
I stand in front of La Virgen del Tránsito. I am struggling to remember; I am struggling to forget.