By chance, I joined a tour of the newest of my new towns through the Montana History Conference, and by chance, I stumbled upon a concert venue and used media store and soup kitchen in a century-old grocery store called Kirk’s. There was a dog who ignored me and a story about an axe murder where the musicians play shows for a venue smaller than my classrooms.
It reminded me of places I knew well in my actual hometown, downtown places in the hallways of old western buildings with office space and apartments and studios where local artists would set up their weird installations, pour some crackers on a plate next to a box of wine, and play what I would later recognize as shoegaze music while I wandered around downtown Flagstaff with college friends, drifting in and out of stores reeking of incense and espresso.
I’m not nostalgic, or at least I don’t think I am. But every so often I think of the year 2013, which was, for me, a year of art and anxiety. My memories are mostly positive until I think for a moment. My cousin Bill died that year. I had my first publication. I wanted to pursue a PhD in history and study genocide trials and sectarian violence. I started this stupid blog in October of that year. I spent time with friends I’m no longer in touch with. Maybe I was in love with someone, but looking back it was probably the kind of crush Hanif Abdurraqib writes about in They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, the kind that, after it fizzles like radio static and “whatever love I’ve claimed fades, I find myself renewed, in search of the feeling once again.”
So maybe I am nostalgic sometimes. Kirk’s Grocery rekindled a kind of want I have for what theorists like Henry Jenkins call participatory culture. The history conference, I think, was a good reminder of how common this desire is among people I could get to know better.
I listened to Hanif Abdurraqib read They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us on audiobook on a drive across Montana at the start of the month when the first glimmers of autumn showed in the trees, the wind, the clouds. I share his desire for, not hope, but honesty, which is not the opposite of hope, but is also not an alternative to hope, either.
Like a lot of writers these days, I’ve been thinking about Walter Benjamin’s 1935 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Benjamin’s approach to history could, potentially, be accused of leaning on nostalgia, but his critique of the industrialization of art in the interwar years seems more salient now than in the last few decades.
For Benjamin, the process of photographing or filming a work of art reproduces its image, but not its interpersonal ritualistic utility “embedded in the fabric of tradition” that originally clarified the meaning of that particular image. His point, of course, is not that photography or film are inferior modalities—the Soviet film theorist Lev Kuleshov had already developed a theory of the montage that would later influence everyone from Alfred Hitchcock to Jane Schoenbrun—but that the reproduction of art through industrialized means puts art at an arm’s length from its ritualistic context, which originally “found its expression in the cult.”
Beholding a statue is a ritualistic experience with endless possible angles that situate the viewer in the same possible station as the artist, whereas looking at a picture of that same statue filters its possible meaning through the lens of the photographer who acts as a third-party interpreter. The problem is not photography as a medium, but the use of photography as a replacement for interacting with art. A film cannot replace a political speech; a video cannot replace a concert; a film review cannot replace a film; a video benediction, though sometimes necessary, cannot take the place of the ritual of benediction at the end of a church service.
This is all well and good when considering classical oration. The opening scene in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey depicts the cultic expression of art through a poet engaging, in real time, with a captive audience. The same thing happens in Sinners when Sammie pierces the veil of time and space with his music. Sculptures evoke awe, paintings evoke curiosity, live music aligns us to rhythm. What about my genre, creative nonfiction?
I’m sure hearing Abdurraqib speak in person is different from a curated audio book, which is a form of mechanical reproduction. Still, I found myself pulled in by the cadence and pause of his voice, his momentary reflections over his own diction, the structure of his interrogation.
Good memoir isn’t nostalgic; it’s also not tragedy porn, either, like Hillbilly Elegy, a curated platter of suffering to shore up credentials and advance policy from afar. Good memoir is captured by writers like Abdurraqib’s essay “Defiance, Ohio, is the Name of a Band,” which genuinely feels like a spell being cast when I hear it in his own voice. Good memoir is like Gabrielle Hamilton’s memoir Blood, Bones, and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef, in which Hamilton describes her childhood in New Jersey with a magic trick of contrast: “We trespassed, drag raced, smoked, burgled, and vandalized. We got ringworm, broken bones, tetanus, concussions, stitches, and ivy poisoning” (Hamilton 6). If there is nostalgia here, it is clarified by consequence, and if there is regret, it is pulled apart by nostalgia.
The renewed attention in Benjamin’s essay stems from fears about the imposition of algorithmic technology on art. The key question, I think, is about how we relate to ourselves through art, not how we relate to art in and of itself. I am against, at this point, any firm rule about what is or is not good writing, but for now, what makes memoir worthwhile is the potential for specificity to become universal, however momentarily.
Abdurraqib, Hanif. They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kills Us. TwoDollarRadio, 2023.
