American Remains

1. New York: The return to a place-memory, now multiplied. Before long, memory mutates, places become entangled in their memorial counterpart, while the memory becomes far removed from its origins. What remains of the past if we continue to revisit the places in which the past was formed? In a word, a process of unbinding. Seizing the moment of return, place is not rediscovered in a state of stasis, but rather overruled by the presence of others.

2. Altered Place: I use this term for the disproving of an imagined place-memory. This disproving emerges through the insertion of real place into the enclosed borders of the imagination. Temporal continuity, as I have it, shatters during this phase. But there is another dimension to this dialectic: instead of allowing place to do the work of dismantling the imagination, the other—flesh and blood—steps in where place stood. For instance, it is sometimes the case we revisit non-human things and in the process discover a human modulation lurking. The human thing, in this sense, comes to embody a violation of the formation of place-memory.

3. The Hybrid: But the human does not remain there, as another person. Instead, memory cascades into the present, taking place and human with it. In the process, the time-lapse between place and the other who inhabits that place disjoin. Certain things have survived, others have broken away. We come to experience the breaking-away of things when the other co-inhabits the lived enclosure of memory. A strange experience, indeed, to bring together two altered worlds: each involved in a dialectic of remembering, yet not yet wholly united, but rather floating in the same temporal and spatial sphere. Onward, then, to Pittsburgh.