June 09, 2022
The Memory Activists
by Jefferson Navicky
They knew surprisingly little about the world. At least in its current state of wireless access and passwords and data. Their purview went back further, deeper. Many led campaigns against the Memory Activists, the many for whom forgetting is a more advantageous pursuit. This included not only the expected governmental forces backed by clandestine power and fear; but also those whose commitment to the eternal, sacred present eclipsed the past, and necessitated such active forgetting in the way of emptying the trash at the end of the day. Thus the Memory Activists found themselves wedged into a difficult position, politically declaimed as obstructionists, spiritually maligned as holding on compulsively to a past left long behind. “We need to move forward, not backwards!” and other such chants.
The Memory Activists pricked their fingers in order to take the biometrics of what they should do. It hurt more than they thought. The attendant said it would be just a little prick, as in just a little nothing, but that particular little nothing was definitely more than a little blip prick and actually hurt like a motherfucker, if pricks can be measured in such crass bit increments. So once that was done, the Memory Activists had to wait. Went back to their backroom headquarters and had some chai. “It’ll be about three days.”
The Memory Activists waited very well. So much of their work was waiting for a memory to appear that the Activists were basically buddhas at boredom. And so they all sat around and re-remembered the past and pretty soon the Memory Activists got the news.
According to the biometrics teams, they should…it was a four-page PDF. Wait, they had to scroll to the bottom. Action item recommendation: “Give It Up! Fold! Shutter thyself. Retire.”
Really? The Memory Activists had a hard time believing that. All that money for biometrics, and it’s a fold? They examined the full print out. What did their saliva say? What was their exercise output? What were their spread numbers for the spinal span? How about the quick rider? Everything pointed to give it up. This was crazy, the Memory Activists thought.
Such was the world of big data that copies of all reports were sent to the big panel. So pretty soon the memos started coming in to Memory Activist headquarters: “We hear you’ve been advised to close. We want to help you disappear! Contact us for a special disappearance rate. We don’t mess around – Thx!”
The junk memos kept coming and their insistence started to jack up. “It is now time to shutter thyself!” “Don’t wait!” and the more insidious “It’s time to forget yourself.” It got out of control when the County Mayor called for an injunction against the Memory Activists to obey the biometrics recommendation. It didn’t matter that the Mayor used to be a real estate developer who’d sold off the waterfront, and thus held a vested interest in forgetting the crumbling scaffolding of the past. Once the Mayor backed it, the newspapers picked it up and thus backed the Mayor, and thus the Memory Activists realized it was only a matter of time. They were not fighters in the sense of some activists – Green Peace or Earth First or PETA – they were more the peaceful librarian type of activists who knew life had an inherent value to it and they weren’t about to throw that away. They had kidspetsjobspartnerswoods to uphold.
So the Memory Activists shuttered. Or so they said. A more exact word would be “splintered.” They took to the woods. And to the mountains. And to the other far off fields of resistance, each with their own memory to cultivate. To remember is a prosaic, everyday activity, which demands withdrawal and inwardness. They took to sitting. Memory is like reading, a solitary pursuit conducted in the privacy of the mind and impossible to regulate or otherwise fiddle with. The interior act of memory is not always an act of liberation, but it does define the self and it collects solitude like stones for a cairn. They became unavailable, an inestimably radical act. And some time in the not too distant future, they would gather to remember with a fellow activist, a lover or a child or a friend, and they would hold themselves together in the orbit of others and that orbit would expand gradually until memory again became a public space, activated, remembered together, as it used to be and someday would be again.