One Step Removed from Ash

Vanessa Holyoak explores memory and loss after the L.A. fires, in an essay from LARB Quarterly no. 46: “Alien.”

By Vanessa HolyoakOctober 19, 2025

• LARB Lit

• Memoir & Essay

• Philosophy & Religion

This essay is a preview of the LARB Quarterly, no. 46: Alien. Become a member for more fiction, essays, criticism, poetry, and art from this issue—plus the next four issues of the Quarterly in print.

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MOST NIGHTS I return there. I close my eyes, and I am in the house. Everything is real. I am in the dining room and the light is trickling in through the French doors that lead out into the yard. The framed black-and-white photograph of my brother in front of a museum in London in the nineties is hung in its usual spot. Piles of magazines and old academic papers left by my mother litter the dining table, as they always do. The Saltillo tile floor is cool under my feet, and the plant we’ve tended to in the corner for 30 years is alive and well, its rubbery green leaves turned toward the sea. The house, too, is alive. I take in each detail with my mind; I even take out my phone to snap pictures of all the details I want to remember, knowing this might be the last time. “Memory is a photographer,” writes Suzanne Guerlac of Marcel Proust’s famous meditation on the reworking of the past. “Memory produces memory images from experience just as a photographer fixes images encountered there. […] [M]emory takes snapshots.” Here I am now, taking snapshots inside the dream of the house, granted this rare occasion to make up for lost time. 

I walk through the kitchen now, to the vitrine in the TV room where we keep ceramic sculptures tucked behind glass. I am looking for the porcelain figurines of dancers that my paternal grandmother gave me for each child­hood birthday, a silky-smooth ballerina dancing around a glazed number for each year of life: one, five, nine … I see them near the back of the vitrine; they are so small and far away, a simulacrum of a simulacrum. I take a picture. I walk to my childhood bedroom, a time capsule unchanged since I left home over a decade ago, the walls a crisp mint green. I have an epiphany—maybe I can take the journals with me, the 17 journals I left here for safekeeping in the cabinet under my desk. I open the cabinet door and there they are: the first 10 years of my writing, a haphazard pile. Ten years of life. I empty out a duffel bag in the closet and place the journals inside along with some photo albums I am surprised to find beside them, family pictures tumbling out. This is what I choose to save: writing, photographs.

Friends start to stream in through the entrance now; they admire how much the house looks like a house. I explain: the house is gone. The debris removal came earlier this week. There is nothing left, and yet, somehow, everything is still visible. If there are any real walls left, I tell them, they are brick, nothing but the shell of the house. What we see is an illusion. One friend shouts out now: I see the brick! I turn away, horrified. I am realizing that the vision of the house is tied to my belief. I hold on to my belief extra tight, like I would hold a cat attempting to leap out of my arms. I don’t want to see what lies beneath the simulacrum. I want to dwell here, in the dream of the house. 

I notice a shadowy figure bundle up the duffel bag of journals and photographs. They seal it and swiftly disappear. Ah, I think to myself, of course. Nothing can leave the house with me. It strikes me as a kind of law, a principle ordained by unseen forces. I can observe all I want, but I can’t take anything back with me. In other words, what happens in the dream of the house stays in the dream of the house.

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“I dream, therefore it is written,” Maurice Blanchot tells us in his short essay, “Dreaming, Writing.” Elsewhere, in The Writing of the Disaster, he notes: “It is not you who will speak; let the disaster speak in you, even if it be by your forgetfulness or silence.” For Blanchot, the shape of sleep echoes that of the disaster—both beckon us to a passive space of suspended and estranged selfhood, entirely beyond our control. Dreams, in this framework, become a confrontation with the absence heralded by both sleep and the disaster: the absence of the dreaming subject. Dreams, writing, disasters: these things are not experienced. They happen to us.

I have not written much since the disaster, but the disaster is writing me. I am afraid of forgetting, but my dreams continue to write, to take photographs. My silence, it would seem, is hard at work. Every night, I weave a new thread into my immaterial archive, amassing images in an invisible pile. For Henri Bergson, this memory pile is alive, ever accumulating, and seeping into the present: 

Memory […] is not a faculty of putting away recollections in a drawer or of inscribing them in a register. There is no register, no drawer; there is not even, properly speaking, a faculty, for a faculty works intermittently, when it will or when it can, whilst the piling up of the past upon the past goes on without relaxation. 

Without relaxation. In the months since the fire, I have taken on a new, unpaid job: I have become an archivist. I ask myself: How to write the disaster when it is the disaster that leaves writing in ruins?

By night, I archive dream images, taking snapshots with a phone that is lighter than air. During the day, I stockpile, over and over again, the objects that we still have, which are mostly photographs. They fit into a single worn suitcase that my mother had the foresight to leave with my partner and me at our home in Silver Lake, situated between the Pacific Palisades and Altadena blazes. I fit the loose photographs and ephemera into archival sleeves and add them to the albums—the accumulated wedding invitations my mom has saved over the years, the photos of my now long-divorced parents traveling in Europe before my brother and I were born, our baby footprints in acrylic paint. I scour the internet for objects that remind me of my childhood bedroom, miraculously finding a woven bamboo bedside lamp in the form of a Polynesian-Japanese hut (according to the eBay listing). It is an exact replica of the lamp my parents brought back from my mother’s hometown of Hong Kong, a lamp I had always interpreted as a Chinese temple. 

On the night the lamp arrives a few weeks later, my brother comes over to celebrate. We stand out on the front porch, watching the dark hills that used to be on fire. He says it reminds him of the Ship of Theseus, a thought experiment that asks: If every part of the ship is replaced, every wooden plank swapped out, is it still the same ship? We gaze meekly at the new old lamp, swirling our whiskeys. To me, now it is that lamp, he says. Every part of the lamp is different, but the idea it represents is the same. Blanchot: “The disaster ruins everything, all the while leaving everything intact.”

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It’s been over three months since the fires broke out. Here’s what I remember: Watching flames engulf my childhood town of the Pacific Palisades, glowing crimson against the hills. My evacuated family—mom, dad, stepmom, teenage half brothers—cramped under our roof in Silver Lake for a night of restless sleep. Waking up to the news that everything is gone. Holding out hope. My first school, my dad’s house, and the home where I grew up with my mom and brother. Satellite images showing burned-out shells of homes, our homes. Thirty years on the top of the hill disappeared in one windy night. The pit in my stomach when I realize: My journals. I left all my journals in my bedroom. Swells and swells. My body becomes the ocean, overflowing. I am a ship capsizing out at sea and the ocean flooding it. Every part will have to be replaced—lungs, heart, eyes. 

When they replace each part of me, will I be the same?

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Three months later, Blanchot’s words come to me like an incantation: “When all is said, what remains to be said is the disaster. Ruin of words, demise of writing, faintness faintly murmuring: what remains without remains.” The disaster marks language’s limit. It is the night that leaves writing in ruins. Here in the space left behind by the disaster, the remains without remains, there is nothing to write. A series of riddles pulses in me: How to write about the ruins of writing. How to rewrite an archive if the archive has always been destined for disappearance. What is this impulse to make marks at any and all cost, even if, perhaps, our marks can only ever be written in invisible ink? And yet the simultaneous disappearance of my written and familial archive has spurred me to make new marks, to trace the absence of an archive turned to ashes, to write the disaster in order to begin again.

One might say that I am possessed by an archive fever: I am en mal d’archive. I spend the months that follow in a haze; when I am not in my archival frenzy, I am huddled into my couch, pouring over French theory for my upcoming PhD qualifying exams. I take breaks to address that other stealthy disaster, my health. 

Back in January, amid the blazes, my partner drives me to the Valley to get an MRI of the sacroiliac joints. In the waiting room, people are FaceTiming their loved ones, seeking reassurance: Are you okay? I am adamantly not okay. I sit mostly in silence until I am called. Inside the machine, I can imagine this week never happened. A few weeks later, my chronic and debilitating back pain finally has a diagnosis: I have an inflammatory autoimmune disease called axial spondyloarthritis. Left untreated, my vertebrae will eventually fuse together. And so, I take breaks—to inject myself with my new immunomodulating drug, to go to aqua therapy, where I immerse myself in pool water that smells of bleach. It feels good to come here once a week and do what I am told. I tell no one of the fire, of what’s been lost. I let the water engulf me on all sides: here I am safe from the flames. 

I cannot help but notice—my body seems to be writing a narrative parallel to the fire’s, each its own disaster. My body and my mother’s house tell me the same story, heaving for breath: I am inflamed. I am in flames.

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Jacques Derrida reminds me that the archive was never meant to last. In preserving, we are faced with an inevitable erasure. As we select what to include in the archive, we inadvertently disappear the rest. In other words: The archive unarchives itself; it is haunted by the anarchive, as Derrida says. The archive contains both the drive to preserve and the drive to destroy. Maybe Blanchot would go so far as to whisper: within the archive lurks the disaster. Perhaps the disaster, prowling the archive, unwrites our words in invisible ink, “de-scribes,” in Blanchot’s language. Now that the disaster has erased my writing, I write from this absence, from this lack. Not knowing what to write nor why, I dream, and by not writing, I write: “Not writing is among the effects of writing; it is something like a sign of passivity, a means of expression at grief’s disposal. How many efforts are required in order not to write—in order that, writing, I not write, in spite of everything” (Blanchot). 

The writing of grief is unwritten; it bursts forth in spurts of silence, riddled with absence and ash. 

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I picture myself, 15 years old, scribbling fervently alone in my room well past bedtime, performing this ritual gesture toward permanence by spilling ink onto that most hazardous and fragile of materials, paper. Fifteen was the year I began to read for pleasure, and also the year I began to write. Was it my mother who offered me my first journal? I remember the first time, there on the yellow couch in the sunken living room. The marks didn’t come easily, but the practice soon became a ritual, my own. I wrote everywhere—in the orchard grove behind the house, smoking cigarettes I would hide in the same precious desk cabinet where I kept my journals, all 17; out on the grass in front of the house, starting out toward the Pacific; but mostly, in my own room, a space I created as a kind of cocoon from the outer world, a kind of prism in which time was held, crystalized. I picture myself there, in my twin-sized bed shrouded in fairy lights, words coming to me like a call from the void, dictated to me as dreams are, authorless. In those moments, laden with a feverous intensity, I became a vessel for sentences that had begun to write themselves in sloppy, loping cursive. The words came and I wrote them, again and again, as if I were weaving a spell around myself, an immaterial veil that nothing could penetrate. The bedroom is the place where writing and dreams begin.

For 10 years, those leaves of paper were evidence of a life lived, anxiously but fervently, with a kind of desperation for experience, a ripe eagerness to know other bodies, languages, landscapes. Now that all the evidence has been turned to ash, I catch myself wondering: Did I really live if I no longer have proof of my existence? To which I respond: It is the act of writing that matters. Nights caught up in archive fever, pressing each feeling into paper for preservation, chronicling my experience into evidence—it is the act that counts, not the traces. The traces serve as a kind of legend or code, a shorthand to make memory legible. The code is gone, but the memories, illegible, remain. I will have to find another way to read them.

In other words: Language is marked in advance by loss. 

My writing is riddled with holes. It is haunted both by what is not written and by writing’s disappearance. Is all writing an ode to absence? It is absence that calls us to write. Do we write in the presence of the things we love? If we do, it is to hold them closer while we have them, to forestall against a future absence, theirs and ours. Even here, as my words pour into this screen, I know that they are still subject to erasure, along with the experiences they imperfectly represent. I am selecting from an endless stockpile of memory, archiving, anarchiving. Amid all this loss, I am searching for new ways to read my memories, looking for signs of the past before it can slip away from me for good. What I find is that there is too much: too many glimpses of memory, too much time to recover. But I chase after it nonetheless, this lost time seeping at the glimmering edge of my senses. 

The fire has stoked in me another kind of fire, a Derridean archival fire: 

We are en mal d’archive: in need of archives. […] It is to burn with a passion. It is never to rest, interminably, from searching for the archive right where it slips away. It is to run after the archive, even if there’s too much of it, right where something in it anarchives itself. It is to have a compulsive, repetitive, and nostalgic desire for the archive, an irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for the return to the most archaic place of absolute commencement.

I turn the pages of the photo album, see my mother holding up my smiling baby face, our pink cheeks hot with joy. She is so young here in this new country, in her new house on the ridge of the mountain, not much older than I am now. I know it is a privileged moment among a lifetime of moments, but it is all that I have. I hold on to these snapshots of time like Roland Barthes’s Winter Garden photograph, an image of his late mother as a child that offered “the impossible science of the unique being” in the face of her absence. “Mother, I dream you just to be able to see you,” writes Theresa Hak Kyung Cha in Dictée. “I write. I write you. Daily. From here. If I am not writing, I am thinking about writing.” Like Cha, I am thinking about writing, writing about writing, about losing my writing. I, too, turn to dreams as a space to catch memories as one would a cold, in which the real brushes up against the immaterial, a place where the disaster writes itself and I stand by, taking pictures. 

In dreams, in writing, in photographs, we visualize the invisible. We collect imperfect fragments by which to remember a life, a shadow archive of things now gone. Fragments like the analog photograph that offer a material index of light imprinted on a body, a house, a day, that tells us that the thing was there. Or like the written word, which contains another kind of residue, Proust’s “pinch of magic sand […] mixed with the dust of reality.” But we remember: dust and sand are only one step removed from ash.

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And so I return there, to the house. This one is real (not as dream but as memory—or as memory of dream). I am a child; the smoke alarm battery is dead and it beeps in the hallway, keeping us awake. My mother and I retreat to my brother’s bunk bed, the room at the farthest remove from the noise. We curl up and sleep together. In the night, I begin to move, still fast asleep with eyes open. I want to climb down from the bed to go to the bathroom. But I cannot find the ladder; instead, I place one foot after another into thin air over the side of the bed, as if stepping down imaginary rungs. Then I am in a pile on the ground crying, still unable to awaken. My mother comes down and gathers me up, carries me back up to the bed. In the morning, I wake with no bruises and I am sure that it has all been a dream. I emerge into the kitchen, California sunlight pouring onto the ceramic countertops. I tell my mother about my dream. She replies, No, that really happened. I ask her why she didn’t want to wake me up. I didn’t want to disturb your sleep. 

Some 20 years later, my sleep has been disturbed. Each night, I ask of the disaster: Did I dream you? And each morning, eyelids still heavy, I remember: No, that really happened. 

I am still afraid of forgetting. There is much I have already forgotten. When I try to catalog the loss, I am confronted with a frenetic emptiness as my mind darts imperfectly from one half-remembered object to another. But then I recall Blanchot, one last time: “In the heart of oblivion it is memory without rest.” I return to the disaster in the night to remember; I am restless in the heart of rest. I am surprised by how easily the memories come, by the uncontrollable effortlessness of dreams. The night confronts me with Proustian involun­-tary memories, fragments of a life for me to reassemble: a decades-old terra-cotta plate, a stick-figure drawing of my mother with squiggly lines representing strands of long hair, so vibrant I could touch them. Cha: “it is not difficult to remember, only pain. because of the wound, / but it is my calling. i have no other occupation, than to remember.” In sleep I exchange one pain for another, I lay down my burning body to resurrect the ashes of writing and I get to work. 

I go home. I return to dwell there, in the dream of the house, the one place that is forever off-limits to my waking self. In the night I toil, I pluck memories like photographs to add to my diaphanous archive. And I tell myself: Here in the dream that is the disaster’s remains is where writing begins to begin again.

It begins with a question: Is the house still the same, now that it is made of wind?

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Featured image: Courtesy of Vanessa Holyoak.