What to remember a loved one with?

Something he used.

His hat.

A black leather hat, wears make it old but do not bring it down. Two metal chains run from the left side to the right. At the top of the front is a small golden statue, with three animals standing on a globe: A lion, a dinosaur whose head and tail both look like arrows, and an eagle with thick legs and webs between toes.

His lighter.

A shiny metal Bentley lighter, short and wide unlike most lighters, engraved in black: “Randy Sauder.”

Something of her.

Her hair.

A lock of hair, braided, tied at the top with a pink ribbon bow so that it makes a loop.

A lock of hair, twisted like a Chinese knot, preserved under the glass of a brooch or a necklace.

A wreath made of hair, like a pair of antlers, at the tip of each branch the hair twists into a flower, stringing a bead; the untwisted hair makes leaves.

Photos.

In a loose dress with puff sleeves and lace collar, she sits on a chair with carved back, and supports her right arm on the edge of a table. Her hair is divided in the middle, each side making a braid tied to the back. She looks serious, like other women photographed then usually are.

He stands in front of blinds, tanned, sturdy, and hairy, with beard and moustache on the face. Naked except for the leather hat, he holds a cigarette between his index finger and middle finger, looking straight at the camera.

Something he made.

His drawing.

He drew on the envelop: A redhead lady in a green dotted dress and on blue heels, another with hair tied up on top of her head and wearing big earrings. “Post office box 70025,” He wrote, all in bold, in bright colors, and in a pop font, “Houston Texas.”

His letter.

He typed over the edge of the paper because of excitement. He talked about Sawdust Festival, this art event he had been participating for sixteen summers, about his own art being “commercial,” supporting his living and allowing him to do serious work on the side. And he talked about turning 65: “I’m like you, I’m finding out I’m not immortal.”

 

Relics as Remembrance

All these seven objects in the exhibition are “relics” of people passed away. In them, remembrance takes shape in the material, or as David Wojnarowicz would put it,

“I have loved the way memorials take the absence of a human being and make them somehow physical.”

Looking at the hat, Gary would remember how Randy used to wear it when it got cold outside, or even just at home when he wanted to look good and pose for a photo. Reading Bob’s letter, David would remember Bob’s gingerly enthusiasm: He typed some letters outside the page, yet he carefully asked if David would like it before he drew on the envelop.

It is almost always so: We rest our memories in physical objects. I have been keeping diaries since grade one, seeing it as a form of “primary source.” In my collection, there is the beer cap from the first bar I went to, a leaf my friend mailed to me from Evanston to Annapolis, and a drop of blood of my favorite teacher on a glass mounting from my freshman lab.

 

Keeping Relics as a Maybe Futile Battle Against Forgetting

While we remember with these emotionally-charged objects, there is one fact impossible for us to overlook: They are by no means a reproduction of the original memory.

Happenings are impossible to keep. Even if you record every moment of your birth, your first step, and your wedding, you do not keep the happenings, but instead a replicate of the sounds and images. Moreover, while happenings are continuous, relics, however detailed, are always sporadic. Happenings, then, leave relics like a drop of water leaves a pit on mud, which in turn becomes a rock, or like a perishable piece of garment leaves a button of shell.

As a result, rather than picking up a memory, what you actually do when you look at the relics is making a new narrative. There might be a time when Gary looks at the lighter, he gets fuzzy which hand Randy used to hold the lighter with, and which hand he would use to reach for a cigarette, and when reading the heartbreaking line “hair of Sister Emilia, drowned when only three years old, in the heat of 1877,” the girls cannot remember the color of her eye. In other words, with or without relics, we human beings necessarily forget.

Then the point of the existence of relics cannot be that they replicate a happening. Instead, it is that they allow the act of “keeping.” If Gary did not keep the hat, or David did not keep the letter, or the family members did not keep the locks of hair, these objects would go to thrift shops or recycle bins, and become anonymous, become “nothing.” However, these people kept them, wrote notes about them, and looked at them. Knowing that these things neither bring back the person, nor replicate the memory, they still keep them. The keeping, then, more than an attempt to retain the happenings, is an announcement of an attitude, or a declaration of war on forgetting, a most natural human tendency:

“I am actively building connections with the object. By keeping it out of millions of things I let go, I announce it to be significant. Thus, I am making an effort to not forget, because I want to remember.”

 

Making Relics as a Maybe Futile Battle Against Mortality

On the other side of the relics from their keepers are their makers. Sometimes, the makers of the relics are unconscious, such as the owner of the hat or the hair. However, at other times, they make things with the hope and belief that they will be kept, especially in art and literature.

Such making has a two-fold meaning.

On the one hand, it is the struggle to prove our existence. We rely on material objects, because only through them we can performs “actions,” and bring potentialities into actualities: Only in writing, in making, we create, alter, and leave behind things as evidence of our existence. We write out our worries and sorrows so that they are not only in our minds, but also come to be in the world, as Bob would complain that fewer people came to Sawdust, and David would grumble that his friends did not appreciate his drawings.

On the other hand, it is the attempt to exist beyond our existence.

As Bob has made clear,

“I am not immortal.”

We all well know that we die eventually, and our bodies perish. As the souls that used to be in the bodies part with them, we as the combination of the two cease to “be.” While we know we cannot last forever, we strive to exist beyond our existence through objects that last longer than us. Those worries and sorrows that Bob and David shared, for example, exist as long as the pieces of paper exist regardless of the condition of their makers.

That is, we make relics to declare a war against mortality:

“I know I would die one day, but I leave these things, which prove that I existed.”

 

“Keep the shadow ere the substance fade,” in fact, was an advertisement for daguerreotype when it first became commercialized.

A large portion of its customers were the families that lost a child, which was far from rare then, who sought to take a picture of the child passed away, posing him or her as alive.

In sadness, however, there arises this almost quixotic strength of mankind: Knowing that we forget, and knowing that we die, we strive to remember, and we strive to be.