. . . Where there is no trace, there is no memory. Any recollection or remembrance, however negative or incomplete, and it must be both, any act of commemoration or learning-by-heart, however halfhearted or mechanical, but it need not be either, presupposes the existence of traces. Sheer oblivion amounts to tracelessness . . . A person who died at the age of twenty-seven is always a person-who-died-at-the-age-of-twenty-seven. Frozen, arrested, no longer counting or continuing, like a fish caught in ice (still the image of fidelity), she remains the way she was at the moment of her disappearance . . . Yet something happens. There are residues, like dust, and the person survives in our memory — a locality of altogether different proportion, density and inclination. But nonetheless without proper site. Rather, it is like smoke solidified into thin pillars, a hovering space. And though her survival is predicated on the occurrence of death at a particular time and place, its temporality — peculiar not only by name, but in nature — is no longer that of conventional time, to be called upon with the help of a telephone or the turn of a wrist. Not entirely. It is, rather, its trace . . . A trace, moreover, virtually nil and naught — a zero which, in the gray zone of memory, gives to aerie nothing / A local habitation and a name . . . For here, in the labyrinthine storehouse of impression and experience, whose walls are of dust thick as blankets during winter (but as light as pillars of smoke), there is only continuation of that which does not continue, survival of that which did not survive . . . Does this infinite expanse — airy, nebulous, expanding as a blot of ink on paper — and which is the name not of living but of living-on — does it still have features akin to those of the continuing and forgetting, of the breathing? Extension in the manner of hands extended? thickness as in words spoken amorously, emotion moving placidly? or thereness like the trees we do not see in Bishop Berkeley’s woods? . . . If zero is the name of nothing, and thus a something — the trace, then, of a void — it is not only a misnomer (like the word oblivion which we did not forget) but also not identical with itself. Hence it cannot be the point at which water freezes, or the intersection of the ink-hued horizon and a pen which can only write by borrowing its color, or for that matter a balding head. Nor is it a page as blank as a vacant stare, an empty parking lot, the word not, or the breathless mouth of a poor swimmer. Zero does not amount to the vain fumblings of a person seized by unrequited love, the perpetually renewed apostrophe of his aching desire, as hollow as the mouth of someone with too sweet a tooth, or the silence in the grainy aftermath of Krapp’s last tape. Neither is the lap of Ophelia nil, nor null the letter capitalizing her name. And least of all is it the loop performed by a trapeze artist courting deadly danger before his hands clasp those of his partner which are not naught, either. Zero is not a buttonhole. Nor God . . . But the shape things take on in oblivion. And thus the figure it traces is as incongruous as it is accurate, in addition to being both faithful and deceptive, like the weather report. Oblivion, therefore, may be traced, like so many points of elision. Hardly often and never always, but traced nonetheless. The difference to memory’s traces being that those of forgetting remain chancy and hazardous, putative at best, like orphaned children . . . And are the traces that obliterate the traces of which memory is made, effacing recollection while commemorating its disappearance . . . Oblivion: barely a habitation, not really a name. Anymore. As if the forgetter’s silent whisper spelled shadows instead, and her being initialed the B of that other beginning . . . oh B, live on . . . The emergence of disappearing, and the trace of a trace . . . neverending, incomplete . . . dots like the marks of the point of a pen, tipping distractedly against the white surface of what cannot be recalled . . . or called back . . . or retrieved . . . the inside of a wind . . . Such and much more such the hubbub in his mind so-called till nothing left from deep within but only ever fainter oh to end . . .

(B.B. in memoriam. June 17, 1993.)