A collection of objects and the memories they set in motion

Marshall Harris · Salon narrative

For more than forty years, I have collected small things that remind me of being somewhere, knowing someone, or experiencing something I wanted to hold onto. A matchbook from a favorite restaurant. Ticket stubs from my first Boston Red Sox game. Ordinary things that might otherwise have been thrown away.

I began placing these objects in individual sandwich bags and calling them my “baggie art.” The collection has grown to several thousand pieces—a visual journal assembled from the small remnants of a life.

When exhibited, the objects form a grid across the walls. There is no prescribed chronology. A fragment from thirty years ago might sit beside something collected last week. Their proximity creates unexpected encounters, much as one memory can bring another to mind without regard for the years between them.

I can look at an object and recall where it came from, who was there, or what was happening in my life. The object supplies a starting point. A matchbook may lead to a restaurant, then to a conversation, a person, an apartment, or an entire period I had scarcely thought about in years. Something small opens onto something much larger.

I think of a computer retrieving a file whose data is distributed across different locations—or, in some systems, across multiple drives. What appears as one coherent thing is assembled from information held in separate places. The comparison offers a way to imagine how remembering feels: a clue sets a search in motion, and fragments begin to gather.

1

THE ATELIER CODEX · ETERNAL EPHEMERA

I use this as an analogy, not a literal explanation of how the brain works. Memory is less dependable than a saved file. It can be incomplete, and what returns may change with the circumstances of remembering. An object supplies one clue; a place, a smell, a photograph, or another person supplies another. Together, they may bring experiences from widely separated periods into the same moment of recognition.

The collection gives those clues a physical presence. Although the objects carry my associations, visitors bring their own. My ticket stub might awaken someone else’s memory of a ballpark, a summer afternoon, or the person who took them to their first game. The histories differ, but an ordinary object can open a door into either life.

Earlier versions of Eternal Ephemera proposed photographing every item and building a digital system of continually changing arrangements. That component has since been scaled back. The physical collection and the act of encountering it remain central. There is already considerable movement within a still arrangement: attention travels, associations form, and one recollection leads somewhere unexpected.

The title holds a contradiction. Ephemera are things made for brief use, yet we sometimes ask them to carry memories for a lifetime. Preserving a matchbook cannot preserve an evening intact. It can, however, leave us a way back toward it.

Eternal Ephemera gathers those small points of return. Each object waits for a glance, a question, or a moment of recognition to set something in motion.