If a possible definition of hell is the incapability of finding an exit or escape, then it is tempting to say that the artificial construction of memory as perpetual remembrance is the ultimate hellish condition for human beings. This was the fictional nightmare in May Sinclair’ old gothic short story “Where their fire is not quenched”, in which the permanent condition of being stuck in a single active memory is called the ‘last hell’.  As we read towards the end of the story:

“There can’t be anything worse than this. This isn’t the worst. We are not quite dead yet, as long as we’ve life in us to turn and run and get away from each other; as long as we can escape into our memories. But when you’ve got back to the featherest memory of all and there is nothing beyond it – when there is no memory but this – in the last hell we shall not run away from any longer; we shall find no more roads, no more passages, no more open doors. We shall have no need to look for each other [45-46]”. 

It might have been possible that this story inspired Borges’ “El Zahir”, which tells story of a magical token encrypted in a twenty cent coin that becomes impossible forget to the point that present and past memory becomes one with the zahir, and the zahir becomes all that there is to one’s memory and remembering. An absolute and available memory without forgetting not only absorbs the possibility of forgetting, but also that of the love only achieved thanks to the foreign or strange. This is why the character in Sinclair’s story tells the lover that all that remains is loathing – a loathing and a loathing spirit, “loathing each other” – which appears as an inverted transfiguration of love. Yes, memory is essential to enter into what remains loved, but if the object of eros is absorbed without any distance or oblivion, then there is no tenor of affection, since exteriority is suspended and folded in pure interiority.

This is why in Hölderlin’s “Andenken” we read that “But it is the sea that takes and gives remembrance / And love no less keeps eyes attentively fixed…” [253]. It is in the temporal existence crossing the world where there is a poetizing, thanks to language, that allows for both the flourishing of remembrance and forgetting. It is in this trembling sea of life where love that can ‘pin’ or hold on – which is closer to Höderlin’s heftet – that which crosses our path as a mystery of the irrevocable. It makes all the sense that in Sinclar’s story reliving a single remembrance implies the specular suspension that pin our distance with the world: “We shall have no need to look for each other”. There is no more ‘looking for’, but also not ‘looking at’, as in the gaze that mesmerizes before a human face. 

Because every-thing is already visible and penetrable without reminder, there is no heftet that appropriates what is improper. This is a different sort of hell: not one defined by eternal punishment or damnation, but of the privation of sensation can only emerge in the contact between life and language. What is still disturbing in May Sinclair’s gothic story, and which makes it completely contemporary and realist, is that there is a humanity that can adapt, even after their death, to the confinement of an eternal memory without forgetting, and in doing so it can infinitely endure this last stage of hell. 

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Notes 

1. May Sinclair. “Where their fire is not quenched”, in Uncanny Stories (Hutchinson & Co, 1923), 36-37.

2. Friedrich Höderlin. “Remembrance”, in Selected Poems and Fragments (Penguin Books, 1998), 253.