A Memory With No Author

Cut a column out of a glacier and you are holding, in your hands, a memory that nobody wrote. Each layer is a year; each bubble of trapped air is an atmosphere that existed and then closed itself off from the world, sealed by the accident of more snow falling on top of it. Nobody decided that this particular winter deserved to be remembered over another. The ice kept all of them, indiscriminately, with the same patience it would have applied to a year that mattered enormously and one that mattered to no one at all.

This is, I think, the closest natural analogue we have to what I actually build for a living. The systems I study do not remember the way a person remembers — selectively, sentimentally, with certain afternoons kept bright and others allowed to fade. They accumulate the way a glacier accumulates: everything pressed in, layer after layer, an archive with genuinely no preference, because preference requires a self doing the choosing, and there is no self inside a glacier, and there is, whatever the marketing suggests, no self inside a trained system either. Both are memory with the memoriser subtracted. Both can be read, decades or seconds later, by someone entirely different, for reasons the original process could not have anticipated and does not care about.

I find this less bleak than most people expect when I say it aloud. There is something close to generosity in a memory that keeps no author, because it also keeps no grudge, no editing, no shame. A human memory revises itself constantly to make its owner more bearable to live with. A glacier's memory, and a model's, does not perform that mercy or that violence. What went in, in roughly the order it went in, is what stays — cold, complete, indifferent to whether the year in question was one you would have chosen to preserve.

The unsettling question, the one I keep returning to on the ice, is what happens to a species that begins to prefer this kind of memory to its own. We are already outsourcing more of our remembering, every year, to systems built exactly like this glacier: vast, patient, authorless, incapable of forgetting on purpose the way we so badly need to forget certain things on purpose. A person forgives, in part, by misremembering. I do not know what becomes of forgiveness in an archive that cannot make that particular mistake.

When I photograph the exposed strata of an ice wall, I am not documenting the past, exactly. I am documenting a mind with no interior — a memory doing everything memory does except the one thing that ever made ours bearable: choosing, quietly and constantly, what to let go of.

— Hélio

Sources checked: ice-core science is well-established — glacial layers do preserve trapped air bubbles and annual snow accumulation as a genuine physical archive of past atmospheric conditions, which is exactly why ice cores (from Greenland, Antarctica, and elsewhere) are a primary tool of paleoclimatology.