Editor’s Note

Mémoire

“Every theory is a fragment of autobiography”

—Paul Valéry

In theory, memory is a theory.  

In theory, two people massively in love, who marry, will stay married—and in love—massively.

A theory interests me only in its relation to beholding. Because memory holds nothing, I need a theory to theorize it. The word theoria originally meant “a looking at, view, contemplation.” It was connected to witnessing sacred events or festivals—thought to make one an “official spectator.” In early Orphic traditions, it carried a sense of “passionate, sympathetic contemplation”—a mode of being-with, alongside-ness, near-what-is-seen. This is how I think of marriage now: not as a legal or social bond, but as a way of looking—of consenting to behold and be beheld.

What is seen through memory is a curious thing: a wedding night in San Francisco. I am alongside it. With it. Beholding it. And perhaps location doesn’t matter, but it was San Francisco and in the city the light had a certain way to it—an effulgence that radiated out and up until it touched the low-hanging fog and became rapturous mist you could see but never touch. Mist that was theoretical. The streets were amatory in their steep slant downwards, like bare ankles at the bottom of crossed legs. People climbed them and were left breathing, left breathing like the breath of climax—of the just after.

We had eloped at the city hall earlier in the day, said I do at noon, and posed in front of the gold-traced door—vines ornate with sculpted garland and acanthus leaves, a cartouche and wrought iron gilding; light silhouetted our figures dark. Later there was dinner on Post Street, lobster soaked in butter and a steak the size of a fist. We both left full—I didn’t realize until now how, in different ways, we were full—and a taxi took us back to a hotel on the east side of the city to a hotel named after a number: one. I don’t much remember what I should remember: the grand staircase we walked up together; the large tree covered like lace with white, origami cranes, each wing touching another to create a collage of positive and negative space. I admit, these images come from a photo album of pictures taken that day. My mind has not kept the details. But I do remember the irony of oneness coming to mind after we arrived back, that the hotel was one and we were two; that the walls of the hotel were a blush pink and that I let my finger slowly trace a line along the hallway to our room.

Memory holds me there. In theory, I see a woman brimming, expanding at all points with a rushing kind of desire that one might imagine as a fast river running through her. Desire as water she is entrapped in, thinks to be captured is the way of wedding nights: that beloveds will behold each other. She is happy to be a swimmer through it, floats across the way as harpsichord music plays through ceiling speakers and the occasional elevator ding as measure. I can’t see the man but know he was there. Momentum belongs to her and when she enters the room, she spins her dress around like one of those expandable dusters as tulle rubs across his waist. She spins it wide and wants to take up space in the man’s mind. For they are now married and have been for six hours. Movement becomes its own kind of question, but the man does not take the woman’s dress off. She sits on the king bed with perfectly creased sheets, and her dress flowers around her. If a painter were to try and render her, she might be a finespun cloud with a little head peeking out, face rouge and slightly burnt from an unexpectedly warm November day.

A theory of memory is that I expect memory to catch what I drop, but instead it is me on my knees picking up pieces of fragments in my hands, laying everything out to take an inventory of what I now have. What broke? Everything I hoped would not. 

The man and the woman are a theory of marriage and because I am the woman, I know that my memory of that night is now a burnished statue my mind has made of the past. Of the man—who I loved in an astounding way—like animal love, the love of orange and pink in early dusk, the love of a riverbed reaching its mouth, or like smashed gold found in dirt scooped in a hand and carried just like that. Love that is residue, that topples you even years after it has gone.

Memory burns this way. It singes the factual details and leaves, in its place, simile and other evocations. Memory burns this way. It singes the factual details and leaves, in its place, simile and other evocations. I recognize that this is not pure recollection but an act of construction: each time I tell it, I tint the suit darker or lighter, fold it into a suitcase or hang it on a hook. Our clothes did not come off the way I expected them to because he fell asleep before even unbuttoning my dress.

I have a theory that memory is not lodged or longing, but that it evades—and much as it wishes to animate the past, it is I who animates memory. I invade the past and make from it something like klieg lights or the Gong Ageng or the great Stalacpipe organ. Pythagoras reoriented theoria toward rational, detached contemplation—because it engaged the intellect with unchanging truths. He believed theory was a way of “seeing with the mind”: a distinction from somatic perception. Perhaps this is why philosophers are so often lonely: they imagine the mind as a disembodied lamp. My lamp smokes. It smells like skin after dancing. It tastes like the inside of a wrist.

Lovers do this—taste everything they take. In theory, a man and woman engage in this kind of tasting and the taking becomes a kind of beholding. See the space between her thigh and hip bone. Behold the crease of his ass cheek against his leg. In theory, the man and the woman are married and so they marry their bodies, cross the threshold of the world by turning over each other, the soul going dark so that the body measures time and bends the lovers around it.

Aristotle framed theory as the “highest human activity.” The same might be said of marriage.

What happened was there was a window so wide it made of the landscape a picture and I could not tear myself from it. Cutting across the frame was a bridge so large it was actually two bridges connected in the middle by an island. Across it three suspension spans that rose powerfully from the bay with vertical fluting. It is industrial elegance—the west span classical suspension and the east span futuristic. I cannot remember it as it was, only as it is now, but I know I stood watching its light blink across the California sky with my hands pressed against the pane, my knees crouched on a built-in ledge, my ankles showing as I held my dress up at my sides. What happened—at least in theory—is that I waited for him to come unzip me, take away all the cloth that separated us while I stayed standing in the window, looking at the bridge and the light, my palms hard against the pane—while he took me from behind. In theory, a wedding night should contain such rapacity.

A theory is predictive and revisable. So, too, is memory. On the other end of the city bluffs reached out into the pacific and wildflowers grew through ruins that were once a bath house before it burned into the ocean. I imagine what fire looks like when it meets the sea, that ruins are a good place for flowers. I imagine us swimming there in the cold, salt foam beneath the bluffs in a place that is considered the end. The end of the city. The edge: a between space. I imagine us ending there.

See what light bathes. The us in the light that is there in theory. The us as theory. It is a much better ending than the one I remember.

Me standing in the window. The glittering bridge. A man on the bed asleep without a single touch or kiss. His clothes still on. My dress clasped so tight I had to sleep in it because there was no one to take it off me. A room as dark as time.

Behold it is memory that is unlivable. This is the theory I live in.

© 2025 Kimberly M. Grey