Dim light cast on a stone staircase reveals indents where countless feet wore each flat step into a smooth curve.
Each snowflake that caps the top of a mountain remembers the moment it froze, a memory preserved in its intricate structure.
A bronze statue remembers decades of rubs from tourists, whose photos capture the discoloration that is the statue’s memory.
A series of stone steps, a handful of snowflakes, a well-loved statue. Inanimate objects encode information about the past.
And,
A raindrop falls from the sky and becomes the river. The droplet has no recollection of ever having been a cloud. The quiet river shows no sign of having ever been the drum of rain on a sheet metal roof.
The sheet metal roof has no memory of ever having been the Earth’s crust. It does not recall being excavated, transported, melted, poured, rolled, annealed, transported again.
It has no awareness of the grooves of the other sheets it interlocks with; of the screw that fastens it to the brick. Despite upholding a node in a developed network of fiber optic cables, the roof has no connection with its surroundings. Despite housing a family, it knows nothing of its neighborhood. It remembers only one thing: its final stamping, its condemnation to corrugation.
In its city, the sheet metal is one among an enormous assortment of imported treasures: drainpipes, french doors, air conditioning units, linen sets, gravestones. These treasures are stacked, arranged, placed in relation to one another to sustain human life for a time. Some of them have signature markings, boasting their long journeys from Great Faraway Cultures. A groove on a ceramic attests to thousands of years of history; the stitching on a textile instantly discloses its roots in space and time.
Other goods, however, are ordinary by design. It is as if they simply fell into existence, and they are valuable precisely because they mask their creation. These nondescript items compose the vast majority of structures, matter, and systems in cities. Millions of people housed in a home whose origins are invisible. Its inhabitants are left to create their own story about how the city came to be. The ambiguous origins of our built environment make it malleable to the unifying force of Story.
Long after there’s anyone to keep track of time, the subduction zone between Santiago de Chile and the Nazca oceanic plate unceremoniously flattens skyscrapers, tuned mass dampers, satellite dishes, and insulated double-paned glass into layers of the Earth’s crust. Networks of walkways, beams, and cables come to form the “urban stratum”: millions of years of history condensed into a thin layer of tectonic plate, to be crushed beneath the millions of years that follow. “After one hundred million years, what remains of New York or Mumbai may be a deposit no thicker than the shallow end of a swimming pool.”
It is a violent process, but it is motivated by violence no more than a heavy storm that sweeps away a sheet metal roof.
And,
A series of stone steps, a snowflake, a well-loved statue, a network of originless commodities. Inanimate objects encode information about the past, but only insofar as they form a system discernible to humans: a staircase, a crystal, a representation, a city.
The elements that compose these systems themselves have no memory. The rain droplet has no recollection of ever having been a cloud. The bronze of a statue has no memory beyond that which is given to it by the people who come to rub it. Heavy metals from Earth’s crust are excavated, transported, melted, poured, rolled, annealed, screwed to a brick, woven into a nest of energy and information, then invariably crushed into Earth’s crust again.