The Art Signal | July

On Remembering as an Act of Creation: Some thoughts on art and memory—or scroll down for this month's listings.

Here is something that took the neuroscientists a while to discover, and that most of us still haven’t fully absorbed. Memory isn’t retrieval. It is construction. Every time you summon a moment from the past—a childhood kitchen, a face you loved, a favorite birthday gathering from ten years ago; your brain is not opening a file. It is building the memory again from scratch, using new neurons, in real time.

Which means the version you can access is the version you are currently authoring.

This is less of a metaphor and more of a description of what is physically happening in your skull the moment you say I remember. The past is not somewhere you go. It is something you make, over and over, each time you turn toward it. And it changes each time you make it, because you are changing, and the tools you are using to build it are changing with you.

The poet Ocean Vuong has a line about this that has stayed with me. He points out that the Greek root of poet is poiētēs—one who makes. To be a poet is to be a maker. Which means that to remember is to be a poet. Every act of recollection is an act of creation. Every contact with the past is a small, unconscious composition.

This should trouble us more than it does. Most of us live as though our memories were a private vault, sealed off from the person we’ve become. We assume our past is fixed, even when everything else about us isn't. But the past turns out to be the least fixed thing about us. It shifts every time we go looking for it.

Which brings us, strangely, to art.