Letter from the Editor: Memory Wipe
Ho Lin
Memory: What would artistic creation be without it? Or humankind, for that matter. Historical, cultural, institutional, instinctual memory—take your pick. Memory has been uppermost in my mind recently. Specifically, the loss of it. As middle age continues to chip away at the faculties, I ruminate over what I can remember, and fret about what I’ve forgotten. I stumble upon a fugitive note to myself from a decade or two in the past, and struggle to make sense of the squiggles. I’ve sometimes been accused of being a pack rat, but what I’m really hoarding aren’t objects but reminders: how I felt at such and such a time, in such and such a place.
Recently, the combination of memory and mortality has weighed heavy on a personal level. A family member has been diagnosed with “mild cognitive impairment”—one of those terms that is made to sound innocuous through its clinical phrasing. It’s a condition that I’m told can result in rapid decline and dementia, sometimes within the span of a few years. Since that diagnosis, every interaction with my family member has carried a sense of impending finality. Questions are asked and answered, and the question is asked again minutes later. Directions on how to do certain things are scribbled on paper, and now loose-leaf pages clutter the house, revisions of reminders that are exactly the same as the original. Years ago I shot some videos with my mother before she passed, in which she recounted her family history; I will have no such opportunity with my afflicted family member, and I mourn the lost opportunity for preservation.
Which leads one to more existential thoughts: Does any memory actually survive, anyway? Isn’t the idea of anything persisting long after we’re gone just a con game? After all, the universe will explode in a few million years and that will be that, as Kurt Vonnegut tells us (or someone pretending to be Kurt Vonnegut, just like the graduation speech mistakenly attributed to him). But before this train of thought takes us down the roads of nihilism, I pull back, clinging to the threads of memory that remain in my family member’s life as well as my own, treasuring the few recollections we have left, and the idea that one memory can lead to another, and then another, and then maybe a new idea on top of that, and as long as there are ideas, there is life.
Memory plays a leading role in my fiction entry in this season’s issue, along with all those pesky related questions about impermanence, and what it means to live in a world in which memories disappear faster than they’re made. Similar existential musings figure prominently in many of our contributors’ entries. Darren Sorrels’ “Woker” is a mordantly funny take on being in a state of extremis, while memories prove to be balm (or more problematic) in Sarah Baker’s “Tina and Me” and Margaret Mackenzie-Hooson’s “GOLLIWOGS & Other Childhood Friends.” Specific memories form the backbone of Millicent Borges Accardi’s “KEEPS me Some Money” and Steven Hill’s “Father’s father’s father’s Son.” But lest you think that this issue is only about programmatic content, we direct you to the welcome return of R.T. Castleberry’s poetry to our pages, as well as the work of Martine Compton (whose breathtaking first collection of poems we will be featuring in this and future issues).
“The true art of memory is the art of attention,” wrote Samuel Johnson. If we must relinquish our grip on memories as we muddle forward and onward, let us at least give the art of attention its due, and devote our attention to the talented writers who have contributed to this issue. It’s certainly more fulfilling than dreading the end of the universe, anyway.
Ho Lin is the co-editor of Caveat Lector. He is a writer and musician who resides in San Francisco. His work has appeared in Foreword Reviews, The New York Journal of Books, Your Impossible Voice and The Adirondack Review. His books include China Girl and Other Stories and Bond Movies: A Retrospective.