Life in the Archive

Rowland Bagnall reviews the recent rerelease of Bernadette Mayer’s “Memory.”

By Rowland BagnallJuly 20, 2024

• Art & Architecture

• Poetry

PUBLISHED THE YEAR she died, Milkweed Smithereens (2022) gathers a final clutch of poems by Bernadette Mayer, spanning early sonnets from her archive (housed at UC San Diego) to a number of late pieces charged with the poet’s signature immediacy and appetite for record-keeping. True to form, the poems document moments of surprising change and beauty, dispatches from a world “spiced with entropy,” grounded in the same question that has occupied a place in Mayer’s work for more than half a century: “What is this that’s happening now?”

Best known for her use of temporal constraints, particularly Midwinter Day (1982), a book-length poem composed in its entirety on December 22, 1978, Mayer’s writing is celebrated for its unwavering attention to the present moment. Embedded firmly in the everyday, her work proceeds according to a sense that anything and everything is welcome, an egalitarian poetics that connects her writing to the democratic yawps of Walt Whitman. As Fanny Howe has noted, Mayer “does, in fact, seem to be writing at the same time as she is living,” blurring the boundary between the two as if to make them indistinguishable. Woven throughout Milkweed Smithereens are extracts from “The Covid Diary,” an unfinished daybook of observations and reflections “in the midst of the pandemic,” bearing witness to a period of then-indefinite uncertainty, a journal, suggests Mayer, “as confused, mixed up, as this time is.” Loosely dated—though the chronology seems scrambled—Mayer’s entry for July 2 offers a cryptic recollection. “[T]hat’s the only july i remember,” she writes; “i remember what’s in the pictures but not what’s in the words, the words could be any words, maybe i should’ve memorized memory.”

To readers unfamiliar with Mayer’s work, this entry “about MEMORY” may read as an example of her steady stream of consciousness, a playful (if occasionally abstruse) manipulation of language, imagery, and syntax that has characterized her writerly experiments for decades. (“Do words actually have a meaning?” asks a poem in Works & Days (2016), her penultimate collection. “What does actually actually mean?”) Prompted by the time of year, however, this moment in “The Covid Diary” (“actually”) refers back to a monthlong project executed in July 1971, when Mayer was just 26. In what is now a well-worn story, Mayer shot a roll of 36 color photographs for each day of the month, simultaneously producing an exhaustive, diaristic record of the period, a huge textual accompaniment, what she has referred to as an “emotional science project.” “I wrote incessant notes and made drawings about everything that happened every day,” she later explained. “I wrote down as much as I could without interrupting my life.”

Arguably Mayer’s most important temporal experiment, Memory was originally conceived as an installation artwork. First exhibited in 1972 at 98 Greene Street—a loft space in New York belonging to the gallerist Holly Solomon, who funded the project—the piece included all of Mayer’s photographs (over 1,100 of them) mounted in a horizontal grid, accompanied by six-plus hours of audiotape recordings of the poet reading from her journals. Described by the critic A. D. Coleman as an “enormous accumulation of data,” Memory engulfed its audience, doubly immersing them in audio and imagery, inviting them to access Mayer’s life, even her consciousness. “Much as a fossil arrests time in its disruption of the surrounding rock,” writes Marcella Durand, “Memory is […] a snag, a trap where memory is caught and held,” preserving a tangible slice of the past. After all, “the aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed,” said William Faulkner in a 1956 interview, “so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again because it is life.”

Mayer reworked the various texts of Memory for publication in 1975, an edition out of print for decades. In 2016, over 40 years later, her installation was resurrected by the Poetry Foundation in Chicago, exhibited with a new set of prints; Mayer’s original photographs were mounted at CANADA the following year, a stone’s throw from the loft on Greene Street. A version of the text (minus the photographs) has been available online, courtesy of the Eclipse archive, while Mayer’s audio recordings are accessible through UC San Diego. Finally, in 2020, a groundbreaking edition of the work was produced by Siglio Press, bringing all of Mayer’s photographs together with her text within a single publication. Four years later, following a grant from the Literary Arts Emergency Fund and increased demand after the poet’s death, Siglio’s edition has received a second print run.

At its most fundamental, Memory is an exhaustive archive, an attempt to “include everything,” writes Mayer, however trivial or unassuming. “I had chosen the month at random without knowing what I would be doing,” she suggests, “because I didn’t want to choose a time […] that would be particularly loaded, or […] particularly interesting or particularly dull.” “I looked at the tape deck. I scrambled eggs. I put something on the stove,” reads a passage from July 17, objective as a police report. “We went past the golf course. We went past the farm. I looked out the window at a family of cars. We stopped at a dairy queen for ice cream.” Reading through the journal, one passes the trappings of daily experience: descriptions of food, weather, and household objects; the temperature and time of day; the price of gas and groceries. Mayer transcribes dreams and conversations, phone calls and memories, very often drifting into simply listing what she sees, sculpting catalogs of information—groups of friends and plants and street signs—even offering advice on how to best prepare a cut of veal. Though divided, unsurprisingly, by date, each new day briefly punctuating its flow, Mayer’s writing unspools relentlessly, barely pausing for breath; the text is typeset into biblical columns, blocky and brick-like, emphasizing something of the inexhaustibility of Mayer’s project, page after page after page after page. That Mayer favors the ampersand as her preferred symbol of punctuation nods in the direction of indefinite accretion, aligning Mayer, again, with Whitman. “Whitman is the poet of the grand conjunction, the singer of ‘and,’” writes critic Ed Folsom in a comment that rings true for Mayer: “He is the poet of conjoining, of singing the parts of the world into a massive juxtaposition. He forges a vision of wholeness out of disparate parts held together by his adhesive voice.”

The quotidian aspects of Memory are reflected in its photographs, which capture the texture of life on the go: taxis, street scenes, buildings, windows, landscapes, car rides, hot dogs, bedrooms, bushes, stovetops, billboards, flowers, faces, laundry, sidewalks, meals. While these photos are not intended to be artworks in their own right, Mayer’s knack for catching small moments of grace and beauty is apparent from the start, whether a patch of morning light hitting a carton of eggs or low mist clinging to a wide expanse of open fields. From time to time, her pictures—especially those taken around New York—resemble the work of certain great midcentury photographers, in particular the color images of Joel Meyerowitz, Ernst Haas, and Garry Winogrand.

From its chronology and blocks of text to its endless pages of photographs (arranged in thumbnail grids of nine per page), much of Siglio’s Memory points in the direction of the linear, July unfolding as we read. Several clues throughout appear to indicate forward momentum. Mayer undertook her project at the same time as her then-partner Ed Bowes was working on a set of films for the Berkshire Theatre Festival; often mounted on a tripod, his camera appears in a number of photographs, suggesting something of the linear spool of film. Indeed, as Mayer wrote to Holly Solomon in her initial proposal, Memory itself exists as “a sort of film diary of still pictures,” part artwork, part home movie. Elsewhere, Memory is filled with images of travel and transport, streets and traffic, vehicles and open roads, generating a pervasive sense that we are always on the move, passing from one place to the next. As if to make this observation more explicitly, the photographs also include a steady flow of rivers, quietly unstoppable.

Nevertheless, for all this sense of linearity, reading Memory is far from a straightforward exercise. Highly associative, easily distracted, and prone to digression, Mayer’s text in many ways appears to follow no inherent system, “disorganized & unmethodical.” Seemingly unedited, suggestive of speed, the pages glitch with errors and jump cuts, Mayer’s sentences frequently skipping like a needle on a scratched LP. What’s more, the poet shuffles rapidly (and randomly) through different styles, from documentary catalogs and lengths of real-time observation to what seem more like passages of automatic writing, nonsense, and transcriptions of interiority, noting down whatever happens to turn up as she is writing. A run of several photographs depict the phases of a game of pool, another image suggestive of the linear, a knock-on world of cause and effect; one thinks of the Scottish philosopher David Hume, who uses the example of colliding billiard balls to illustrate our understanding of causation. And yet, throughout her career, Mayer has articulated her suspicions of this doctrine. “The whole cause and effect idea comes from Aristotle,” she has stated; “it’s a whole way of thinking that people in the western world have adopted. It does nothing but harm,” restricting not only our sense of selfhood but also our imaginations, our creativity, even our economic and financial freedoms. “Aristotle did us a great disservice […] by famously advocating cause & effect,” suggests an early piece from Works & Days: “I remember thinking Aristotle was an asshole.” As such, rather than being fully linear, adhering to a logic of causation, Memory appears to phase and fade according to a different syntax altogether, time slipping and overlapping, seeming almost “out of joint,” to steal a line from Hamlet.

Of course, this may have something to do with the fact that Memory was never conceived as a readable text. In its original form, Mayer’s audio and wall of photographs encouraged something like a cross-temporal phenomenon. Although the photographs were hung in chronological order, running from left to right, Mayer hoped her grid would create surprising vertical connections, while the audio—playing on a daily loop—would likely fail to synchronize with whichever photograph(s) a given viewer happened to be looking at, describing something from a different day, like a transmission from another time, invading the present. (The effect of Mayer’s text either foreshadowing or looping back is echoed in the publication; her prose often describes a scene that later turns up several pages later, resurrected in a photograph; at other times, the text will narrate something that has—visually, at least—already happened, as though our presence through the book exists in two time frames at once.) To a certain extent, this spectral quality enacts the unpredictable mechanics of memory itself, disrupting the linear flow of experience, proceeding in accordance with a grammar of association, somehow at odds with the forward momentum of time. To say nothing of their synapse jumps and sudden changes of subject/direction, it seems appropriate that so many of Mayer’s photographs are blurry, dark, and out of focus, as if capturing the haziness of something only half-remembered. This sensation reaches its peak on July 20, for which Mayer took a roll of double exposures, two photographs existing simultaneously within each frame, as though to illustrate not only the inherent blurriness of memory but also an essentially nonlinear procedure of experience. “Time is nature’s way to keep everything from happening all at once,” wrote the physicist John Archibald Wheeler, citing a line he claims to have encountered in a Texas men’s room. And yet, in Mayer’s work, time never seems to be that simple. “Hear the voice of the Bard,” begins William Blake’s Songs of Experience (1789), “Who present, past, and future, sees.”

In 1994, aged 49, Mayer suffered an unexpected stroke. “I’ve always been interested in the brain and consciousness,” she suggested three years later:

I mean it’s amazing that I had a cerebral hemorrhage and now I see all these neurologists and am concerned with all those things in a different way. I think it’s great actually. I shouldn’t say that. I learned in the hospital that you’re not supposed to think a cerebral hemorrhage is interesting in any way. Otherwise you get accused of having a sense of unreality.

With an uncanny, even prophetic prefiguring of this medical episode, it is difficult not to regard Memory as Mayer’s first “cerebral hemorrhage,” a huge spilling of information, like water bursting through a dam. And yet, what’s striking about Mayer’s project is the way it ultimately transcends her. Where Midwinter Day behaves, in some ways, like a self-portrait—depicting “the present writer / At the present time”—Memory seems less and less to do with Bernadette Mayer the longer you spend with it. Mayer has described her hope that viewers and readers of Memory might somehow phase into its author, blurring the two together, like a double exposure. “I deny autobiography,” reads a passage on July 24, “& someone says we are all one man.” “I was fascinated with the idea—could I get them to be me,” she suggests in a lecture of 1978; “these precious little words, written small, are not meant to come on too strong but just to lull you like the whirr of a car,” writes Mayer in Memory, “to lull you then into now being for a while into being me […] becoming part of the rest of the story.”

Rather than becoming Mayer, exactly, we find that we are drawn into “the story.” Reading Memory, we inevitably contribute our own reflections, memories, and fragments to the project, allowing the digressions of our minds to filter through, absorbed by Mayer’s archive, a blending of the “now” and “then.” “[T]hey are from her life,” writes Liz Kotz of Mayer’s strangely “generic” photographs, “but they could be almost anyone’s.” Far from a self-portrait, we find that we are suddenly participating in a moment of collaboration, a collective exercise in time travel, “every one disintegrated yet part of the scheme,” to cite Whitman’s own time-blending meeting place in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” hovering between “the similitudes of the past and those of the future.” Mayer “is a poet devoted to […] the present moment,” concludes Stephanie Burt, “but above all she devotes herself to openness, to open-endedness, to making a poetry that will let anything and anyone in—including, with your permission, you.” For Dan Chiasson, Memory is “still being constructed, reader by reader.” With Siglio’s edition, we can add to it, at last, ourselves.