The fleeting sensation of something that was once there, alive, embodied and is now gone is tantalizing. It leaves no tangible traces, no anchors. Yet it clearly was or else how could it be remembered? This question hints at one of the many unpredictable aspects of memory but it also gestures toward a dimension of vertigo I am particularly curious about: the ‘condition of permanent “not-quite” and “almostness”’ (Knight, 2021: 7, citing Markowitz and Shir-Vertesh, 2015) that stand at the foundation of the vertiginous. Here vertigo emerges as a rupture in linear time, and is experienced as both an overwhelming sensation of things past and as an uneasy question about their veracity. The inability to grasp or to anchor a memory is entangled with a visceral sensation of an experience that somehow cannot be erased. It is this temporal disorder and its accompanying shaky reality that conjure a feeling of spinning out and a threat of losing a hold on reality – an experience of vertigo.

In post-dictatorship Argentina – where the estimated 30,000 forcibly disappeared persons inhabit a state of ‘permanent limbo’ of not living but also not dead (Gatti, 2014: 30) – memory is made up of flickering sensations, of moments that appear to be both very real and at the same time imagined. It is this sense of uncertainty about the materiality of experience (both of the past and the present), and the unhinging sensation that one knows the past although one did not experience it, that conjures a sense of vertigo. I have named this experience of fleeting almostness – ‘disappeared memory’ (Vaisman, 2018) associating its nature both with the unhinged world that was created in the violent acts of forced disappearances that produced the limbo state, and with the ‘time out of joint’ a time that is ‘dislodged’ and ‘disjointed’ (Derrida, 1994: 5, 20), which in turn allows for different temporal coexistences.

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In one of the early chapters of The Buried Giant (2015), Kazuo Ishiguro’s heart-wrenching rendition of this experience of ‘almostness’ in relation to memory is depicted in a short conversation between the older couple Axl and his wife, Beatrice. They stand in an abandoned ruin listening to the boatman describe his interrogation of couples wanting to be transported to the island. Each couple is asked to recount ‘their most cherished memories’ (2015: 63) but to do so separately, so that the boatman can judge if their bond is truly as strong as they claim it to be. Listening to the ordeal Beatrice is frightened. She wonders aloud whether, if they were faced with the situation, they would be able to prove their love by recounting their memories. Axl, hearing her distress, reassures her that the memories of their life together are not ‘gone forever’ but are rather ‘just mislaid somewhere’ (2015: 67), displaced due to the wretched mist. Memories, he considers in a different context, are like fragments of dreams that grow confused in those very short moments of just-waking (2015: 21). But he also wonders how it is that memory slips between the fingers like sand, leading people to forget their loved ones, even their children, and accept hollowed out spaces where once members of the community stood. Their life, their home, their land and all that inhabit it are plagued by the mist, which turns memory into almost-graspable snippets of life just shy of being captured and anchored in the present.

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In her blog turned book Diary of a Montonera Princess – 110% Truth, the playwright and author Mariana Eva Perez offers a description of this experience of unhinged memory and the sense of vertigo it offers up.

Picana [electric needle], beatings, pentotal, hang. This was what I read in a book I found at home when I was eight or nine years old. A black and white cover, a photo of a burnt stroller with the bones of its metallic frame, in the background a wall with bullet holes. In the middle of a chapter with no title, by surprise, a betrayal, they would kidnap Patricia J* R*. And a few pages later, until that moment they did not torture her physically. Her husband was brutally tortured for days, with picana, beatings, pentotal, hang.

Her husband is my dad… Picana, beatings, pentotal, hang. I do not know what pentotal means, I do not know what picana means, I do not understand how a person can hang. There is another image, another secret reading or fantasy or nightmare: another form of torture which is to put the feet of the prisoners inside the roof with cement. Maybe I read about a few bodies that were found in cement ceilings in the canal of San Fernando in the newsletter of *** that Site brought. I wonder if they had done that to Jose as well. I feel his pain in my body, I feel the picana even if I do not know what it is and I feel the feet that break when the cement hardens. I do not have words to say it, I can’t tell that to anyone, but I feel it. (Perez, 2012: 24-26, my translation)

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When I interview Mariana in Buenos Aires, our conversation meanders towards other experiences of unhinged temporalities and visceral certainties. Many of the narratives and others I discover in books, films, photography and poetry by other children of disappeared¹ seem to be entangled in this ‘swirling maelstrom of time and history’ (Knight, Markowitz and Frederiksen, this issue) where terrible violence shapes memory, as in Ishiguro’s novel. They appear to be an intrinsic element in the lives of the children of disappeared and as such they have both personal and collective impact. Maybe one reasons is that the vertigo I identify in Mariana’s text as well as in others, such as the montage of image-bodies on live-bodies – projected photos of disappeared parents on the bodies of their live adult children – in the work of Lucila Quieto (Archaeology of Absence)² are only momentary experiences and, at the same time, a constant presence that lurks in the background. This co-existence of temporal rhythms – momentary (albite etched in paper or celluloid) and constant as another layer of reality – is disquieting and quite similar to the uneasiness generated by the spectre in Derrida’s analysis (1994). This layering of temporal forms puts us on edge, as we constantly try to identify when vertigo will make a new appearance.

Endnotes

1. The children of the estimated 30,000 forcibly disappeared persons in Argentina have played a particularly important role in raising awareness about the desire and need for truth and justice. Some have used various artistic means to explored their experiences growing up as ‘children of the disappeared’ (see Vaisman, 2014). [↩]
2. https://www.slideshare.net/lalunaesmilugar/arqueologia-de-la-ausencia (accessed 8 April 2022). [↩]

References

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