A hole in the sky

I live in one of the rijtjeshuizen (terraced houses) close to Vondelpark. When I lived in Cape Town, I navigated using Table Mountain. Here in Amsterdam, I use the spire of the Vondelkerk to situate myself, or I should say, I used to. That is, until it burnt down on New Year’s Eve.

I have since re-watched many videos of the inferno. The whole scene is unbearably beautiful, impossible to look away from. Now there is a gaping hole in the sky, and in my mental map of the neighbourhood.

It is quite surprising how personal that loss felt; as though the building belonged to me (a building I had only entered once, to vote in the Water Board elections), or rather belonged to my life. It was on the periphery when I ran (walked) my first marathon, sat crying by the pond, pulled my friend on a sled over the frozen canal.

Isn’t memory just the story we tell ourselves about who we are?

And isn’t memory just the story we tell ourselves about who we are? This matters and that doesn’t, this is where I started the journey to become who I am and these are the landmarks that showed me the way. Does losing one’s memory mean losing oneself? Or is memory a way to keep the illusion of the self from breaking?

Ocean Vuong explores these themes in his latest novel, The Emperor of Gladness. An unlikely bond is forged between Hai, a young man in the throes of addiction, and Grazina, an elderly woman suffering from dementia. Sometimes Grazina is a frightened teenager in wartime, other times she is an assertive mother in her forties. And still, Hai is able to reach her. Their connection suggests that personhood is loosely held in memory, but enacted in presence, in the choice to be wholly with someone, however or whomever they are in the moment.

Jorge Luis Borges adds fuel to this fire in his short story Shakespeare’s Memory. A scholar is offered the impossible gift of William Shakespeare’s memory. On the face of it, it is the dream of every biographer. Though, as he soon learns, having access to Shakespeare’s memories doesn’t deliver Shakespeare’s artistic genius. Inheriting the memory of a life does not mean you inherit it’s aliveness. It’s the difference between what we do and what the doing does to us.

Memory, Borges suggests, is a pile of broken mirrors, shards that we choose to pick up and look into for partial reflections on reality. I don’t think memory is the essence of a human being; I think it’s a way of navigating a life, like a spire in the skyline, until one day you look up and it‘s gone.