Unnamed Memory Quotes

Whatever is unnamed, undepicted in images, whatever is omitted from biography, censored in collections of letters, whatever is misnamed as something else, made difficult-to-come-by, whatever is buried in the memory by the collapse of meaning under an inadequate or lying language - this will become, not merely unspoken, but unspeakable.

Let them be gone now, them and all the others, those I have used and those I have not used, give me back the pains I lent them and vanish, from my life, my memory, my terrors and shames. There, now there is no one here but me, no one wheels about me, no one comes toward me, no one has ever met anyone before my eyes, these creatures have never been, only I and this black void have ever been.

I had a dream about you. It's been a while since I could remember any of my dreams, and still, this one has left me with such strong impression. Even now, when I am fully awake, your face flashes before my eyes. It's a face I can totally relate to, as if it wasn't any more yours than it is mine. Terrifying thing, you know? I can't say I've felt that sort of intimacy with anyone. For a moment you knew all my secrets, without me even having to tell them. For a moment I even knew them myself… While I was looking into your eyes, I suddenly started to realize things about myself that were unspoken for years, like fragments of my inner life that were deeply repressed. It’s hard to distinguish if they were buried inside because dealing with them was such a dirty work, or if leaving them unnamed meant that it was not possible to define them precisely enough, so they would keep their true meaning. Perhaps, all this life that I've known so far was in fact no more but a dream about living. The only thing that has kept me in touch with reality was you… I know it comes as a surprise, and you may be wondering why it took me so long to come clean. You also may be wondering how come you've never noticed before. I've tricked you on purpose, yes, and you must realize it really has nothing to do with you. It’s always been me. This is why, seeing you in my dream like that, came out as a shock. You also must forgive me. You must forgive me because I know how it looks like, that everything we ever shared was a lie, and it wasn't… I am more of an illusionist that a deceiver, but it all comes from being in fact, a very private person. Even if it was true that you knew me better than anyone, I’d never admit it. I’d rather dig my own heart out, with a rotten spoon, than admitting it. I may let people in my own little world occasionally, but I would never let them be aware of it. I don’t throw my intimacy in front of others, especially when I care. The more I care, the less I give away, and this is something for you to understand, and grant me your forgiveness. I didn't play my tricks on you in order to deceive you, but rather to save myself, and maybe even deceive myself as well. I’ve had hidden my feelings for you so deeply that I've learned to live with them, as if any other casualty. I have done wrong to myself as much as I did to you, and I don’t know if I can forgive myself. So now I wonder, could you forgive me without feeling sorry for me? I certainly don’t deserve your pity. Especially not now that I am awake.

Scent is the key to the door of memory.

Smell is of all senses by far the most evocative: perhaps because we have no vocabulary for it – nothing but a few poverty-stricken approximations to describe the whole vast complexity of odour – and therefore the scent, unnamed and unnamable, remains pure of association; it cannot be called upon again and again, and blunted, by the use of a word; and so it strikes afresh every time, bringing with it all the circumstances of its first perception.

I'll make myself a memory, I have only to listen, the voice will tell me everything, tell it to me again, everything I need, in dribs and drabs, breathless, it's like a confession, a last confession, you think it's finished, then it starts off again, there were so many sins, the memory is so bad, the words don't come, the words fail, the breath fails...

the question may be asked, off the record, why time doesn't pass, from you, why it piles up all about you, instant on instant, on all sides, deeper and deeper, thicker and thicker, your time, other's time, the time of the ancient dead and the dead yet unborn, why it buries you grain by grain neither dead nor alive, with no memory of anything, no hope of anything, no knowledge of anything, no history and no prospects, buried under the seconds...

Scent is the key to the door of memory. For a minute, she let herself live in it.

Oh, how often you’ll remember The sudden pain of unnamed longing —Anna Akhmatova, from “I’ll erase this day from your memory,” trans. A. S. Kline, White Flock (Hyperborea, 1917)

Oh, how often you’ll remember The sudden pain of unnamed longing — Anna Akhmatova, from “I’ll erase this day from your memory,” trans. A. S. Kline, White Flock (Hyperborea, 1917)

What would have happened? Lol does not probe very deeply into the unknown into which this moment opens. She has no memory, not even an imaginary one, she has not the faintest notion of this unknown. But what she does believe is that she must enter it, that that was what she has to do, that it would always have meant, for her mind as well as her body, both their greatest pain and their greatest joy, so commingled as to be undefinable, a single entity but unnamable for lack of a word. I like to believe--since I love her--that if Lol is silent in daily life, it is because, for a split second, she believed that this word might exist. Since it does not, she remains silent. It would have been an absence-word, a hole-word, whose center would have been hollowed out into a hole, the kind of hole in which all other words would have been buried. It would have been impossible to utter, it would have been made to reverberate. Enormous, endless, an empty gong, it would have held back anyone who wanted to leave, it would have convinced them of the impossible, it would have made them deaf to any other word save that one, in one fell swoop it would have defined the moment and the future themselves. By its absence this word ruins all the others, it contaminates them, it is also the dead dog on the beach at high noon, this hole of flesh. How were other words found? Hand-me-downs from God knows how many love affairs like Lol Stein's, affairs nipped in the bud, trampled upon, and from massacres, oh! you've no idea how many their are, how many blood-stained failures are strewn along the horizon, piled up there, and, among them, this word, which does not exist, is nonetheless there: it awaits you just around the corner of language, it defies you--never having been used--to raise it, to make it arise from its kingdom, which is pierced on every side and through which flows the sea, the sand, the eternity of the ball in the cinema of Lol Stein.

Bereavement is useful; full-blown depression is not. William Styron renders an eloquent description of “the many dreadful manifestations of the disease,” among them self-hatred, a sense of worthlessness, a “dank joylessness” with “gloom crowding in on me, a sense of dread and alienation and, above all, a stifling anxiety.”14 Then there are the intellectual marks: “confusion, failure of mental focus and lapse of memories,” and, at a later stage, his mind “dominated by anarchic distortions,” and “a sense that my thought processes were engulfed by a toxic and unnameable tide that obliterated any enjoyable response to the living world.” There are the physical effects: sleeplessness, feeling as listless as a zombie, “a kind of numbness, an enervation, but more particularly an odd fragility,” along with a “fidgety restlessness.” Then there is the loss of pleasure: “Food, like everything else within the scope of sensation, was utterly without savor.” Finally, there was the vanishing of hope as the “gray drizzle of horror” took on a despair so palpable it was like physical pain, a pain so unendurable that suicide seemed a solution. In such major depression, life is paralyzed; no new beginnings emerge. The very symptoms of depression bespeak a life on hold. For

Bernard,” he writes, “made a sign to me, and smiled, that I should look upward; but I was already, of myself, such as he wished; for my sight, becoming pure, was entering more and more, through the radiance of the lofty Light which in Itself is true. Thenceforward my vision was greater than our speech, which yields to such a sight, and the memory yields to such excess.”[166] “There goes neither the eye, nor speech, nor the mind: we know It not; nor do we see how to teach one about It. Different It is from all that are known, and It is beyond the unknown as well.”[167] This is the highest and ultimate crucifixion, not only of the hero, but of his god as well. Here the Son and the Father alike are annihilated — as personality-masks over the unnamed.

Suggested Reading Atkinson, Kate. Behind the Scenes at the Museum; Binchy, Maeve. Tara Road, The Copper Beech, and Evening Class; Bloom, Amy. Come to Me; Edwards, Kim. The Memory Keeper’s Daughter; Ferris, Joshua. The Unnamed; Flynn, Gillian. Gone Girl; Foer, Jonathan Safran. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close; Franzen, Jonathan. The Corrections; Ganesan, Indira. Inheritance; Hanilton, Jane. Disobedience; Jonasson, Jonas. The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared; Joyce, Rachel. The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry; Kidd, Sue Monk. The Secret Life of Bees; Mapson, Jo-Ann, The Owl & Moon Cafe; McEwan, Ian. Atonement; Miller, Arthur. All My Sons; Morrison, Toni. Love; O’Neill, Eugene. Long Day’s Journey into Night; Pekkanen, Sarah. The Opposite of Me; Porter, Andrew. In Between Days; Quindlen, Anna. Blessings and One True Thing; Rosenfeld, Lucinda. The Pretty One; Sittenfeld, Curtis. Sisterland; Smith, Ali. There But For The; Tan, Amy. The Joy Luck Club; Tyler, Anne. Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant; White, Karen. The Time Between; Williams, Tennessee. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway; Yates, Richard. The Easter Parade.

That which is unnamed was first,” it said. “But I am named, flesh queen. Remember.” Its pupils thinned. “The cold one on the ship. She was your kin.” Glorian looked at the other skull. “She fell to my flame. So will this land. We will finish the scouring, for we are the teeth that harrow and turn. The mountain is the forge and smith, and we, its iron offspring—come to avenge the first, the forebear, he who sleeps beneath.” Every warrior should know fear, Glorian Brightcry. Without it, courage is an empty boast. “You confess,” Glorian said, “that you slew the blood of the Saint.” Her voice kept breaking. “Do you then declare war on Inys?” Fyredel—the wyrm—let out a rattle. A score of complex scales and muscles shifted in its face. “When your days grow long and hot,” he said, “when the sun in the North never sets, we shall come.” On both sides of the Strondway, those who had not fled were rooted to the spot, fixated on Glorian. She realized what they must be thinking. If she died childless, the eternal vine was at its end. What she did next could define how they saw the House of Berethnet for centuries to come. Start forging your armour, Glorian. You will need it. She looked down once more at her parents’ remains, the bones the wyrms had dumped here like a spoil of war. In her memory, her father laughed and drew her close. He would never laugh again. Never smile. Her mother would never tell her she loved her, or how to calm her dreams. And where there had been fear, there was anger. “If you—If you dare to turn your fire on Inys,” Glorian bit out, “then I will do as my ancestor did to the Nameless One.” She forced herself to lift her chin in defiance. “I will drive you back with sword and spear, with bow and lance!” Shaking, she heaved for air. “I am the voice, the body of Inys. My stomach is its strength—my heart, its shield— and if you think I will submit to you because I am small and young, you are wrong.” Sweat was running down her back. She had never been so afraid in her life. “I am not afraid,” she said. At this, the wyrm unfurled its wings to their full breadth. From tip to hooked tip, they were as wide as two longships facing each other. People scrambled out of their shadow. “So be it, Shieldheart.” It steeped the word in mockery. “Treasure your darkness, for the fire comes. Until then, a taste of our flame, to light your city through the winter. Heed my words.

Gray froze as Miss Turner emerged from the hold. For weeks, she’d plagued him-by day, he suffered glimpses of her beauty; by night, he was haunted by memories of her touch. And just when he thought he’d finally wrangled his desire into submission, today she’d ruined everything. She’d gone and changed her dress. Gone was that serge shroud, that forbidding thundercloud of a garment that had loomed in his peripheral vision for weeks. Today, she wore a cap-sleeved frock of sprigged muslin. She stepped onto the deck, smiling face tilted to the wind. A flower opening to greet the sun. She bobbed on her toes, as though resisting the urge to make a girlish twirl. The pale, sheer fabric of her dress billowed and swelled in the breeze, pulling the undulating contour of calf, thigh, hip into relief. Gray thought she just might be the loveliest creature he’d ever seen. Therefore, he knew he ought to look away. He did, for a moment. He made an honest attempt to scan the horizon for clouds. He checked the hour on his pocket watch, wound the small knob one, two, three, four times. He wiped a bit of salt spray from its glass face. He thought of England. And France, and Cuba, and Spain. He remembered his brother, his sister, and his singularly ugly Aunt Rosamond, on whom he hadn’t clapped eyes in decades. And all this Herculean effort resulting in nothing but a fine sheen of sweat on his brow and precisely thirty seconds’ delay in the inevitable. He looked at her again. Desire swept through his body with starling intensity. And beneath that hot surge of lust, a deeper emotion swelled. It wasn’t something Gray wished to examine. He preferred to let it sink back into the murky depths of his being. An unnamed creature of the deep, let for a more intrepid adventurer to catalog. Instead, he examined Miss Turner’s new frock. The fabric was of fine quality, the sprig pattern evenly stamped, without variations in shape or hue. The dressmaker had taken great pains to match the pattern at the seams. The sleeves of the frock fit perfectly square with her shoulders, in a moment of calm, the skirt’s single flounce lapped the laces of her boots. Unlike that gray serge abomination, this dress was expensive, and it had been fashioned for her alone. But it no longer fit. As she turned, Gray noted how the neckline gaped slightly, and the column of her skirt that ought to have skimmed the swell of her hip instead caught on nothing but air. He frowned. And in that instant, she turned to face him. Their gazes caught and held. Her own smile faded to a quizzical expression. And because Gray didn’t know how to answer the unspoken question in her eyes, and because he hated the fact that he’d banished the giddy delight from her face, he gave her a curt nod and a churlish, “Good morning.” And then he walked away.

we both mistake solitude for safety find comfort in wishing ourselves untouchable you a cloud & i fog daily i remind myself every life must be s e e d e d with fingerprints i say a prayer to an unnameable god the constant motion rotating constellations across a sky that will always be my favorite blue the cactus that has & will continue to bloom every spring of my life & hope it's enough to find you whistling a song only birds sing in morning's memory waiting for me to be present in our living

I am grappling with fullness and emptiness and the unnameable something that could change everything. I am thinking of spells chosen, not cast, of polarity, of clear mirrors. I wonder at how the body can brace itself and choose surrender all at once. I contemplate the way Ink bleeds through from one page to the next, and how all the stories do this really, the way the lines of my tattoo soften into my skin over time. The way all lines blur in the end. I hold the language and complexity and sovereignty of my yes. I imagine the spaces where sacred and tender and profane and primal meet and dance. The intimacy that exists between us and how it takes me by surprise every single time. I dream of the way a future want can also feel like a memory lived, where the body inexplicably knows what it has not yet experienced. Of the way that the doing and the undoing of me are sometimes the very same thing. Of the hunger of my skin and my holy pleasure and the turning inward and the space where they collide. Of lighting seeking ground. Of the first taste of coffee in the morning and the way my body unfolds into it. Of the infinities of her and how and where I might one day find and taste them. How sometimes, when I dive into the root of what my lonely feels like, it is just that the light is so beautiful here, and I want someone else to feel it with me. Do you feel it? Tell me you do. Please. Tell me you do.

...grand oaks, maples, and chestnuts muscle in on one another, flared in their autumn robes; a motley conflagration under the dazzling mid-October sun. We are in the middle of a beautiful nowhere, digging into sprawling hinterlands, into territories of wild earth. The rolling, winding roads away from Bangor took us through towns with names like Charleston, Dover-Foxcroft, Monson, and Shirley, all with their own quaint, beautifully cinematic set dressing. It was like each was curated from grange hall flea markets and movie sets rife with small-town Americana. Stoic stone war memorials. American flags. Whitewashed, chipping town hall buildings from other centuries. Church bell towers in the actual process of tolling, gonging, calling. To me, the sound was ominous in a remote sort of way, unnamable.

In his summary of these heroic efforts on the part of the behavioral geneticists to meet this frequent objection of the environmentalists [that identical (MZ) twins develop similarly because they are treated more similarly than fraternal (DZ) twins], [Kenneth] Kendler made no mention of the complete substantiation these studies have received from the Minnesota and Swedish reared-apart twin studies, which lack the potential pitfall of different MZ-DZ upbringings in the same home. He laboriously showed that the one complaint has no basis in fact. It would seem to put to rest once and for all this one complaint and force the critics to find different ones. This was not to be the case. For more than ten years after Kendler’s paper, opponents continued to cite the possibility of different upbringings given identicals as opposed to fraternals as invalidating twin studies. As late as 1994, the objection was raised in the pages of Scientific American. Sometimes the criticism is not alluded to directly. When other critics referred darkly to the “seriously flawed” nature of twin studies that compared monozygotic with dizygotic twins, more often than not the unnamed flaw turned out to be the one Kendler and others had refuted a decade earlier. And there is no possibility the critics who keep resurrecting this charge are unaware of the refutation. Each time the flaw is cited in print, a weary behavioral geneticist will write a letter to the editor pointing out the research that obviates the complaint, but the critics continue to make it year after year. As an outsider, I came into this field believing scientists were simply truth seekers, men and women dedicated to discovering the functioning of the world around them, to understanding the givens. I saw them as driven by profound curiosity. It was, therefore, disheartening for me to learn that many scientists with broad reputations do not place truth at the top of their agendas and react in sadly unscientific ways when confronted with evidence they feel threatens their ideological positions. Aware of the scientific rules, they first attempt to discredit with counterarguments, but when these are shown empirically to be invalid, they simply pretend that the evidence they were unable to shoot down doesn’t exist. Such selective memory permeates the behavioral genetics debate. In the nonscientific world we have a word for such behavior: dishonesty.