The Place of Memory (Day 11)

Date: August 11, 2026

Last modified: August 14, 2026 (13:37 UTC)

There should be nothing here I don’t remember…

Thus is the opening line of Richard Blanco’s poem, Looking for The Gulf Motel, one of my favorite poems of all time. The poem, discussing the sweetness of Blanco’s memory as an eight year old of vacations at The Gulf Motel with his family and the contrasting bitterness of The Gulf Motel and his father being gone now. The above line serves as a connecting phrase repeated four separate times.

I love this poem because it feels like a desperate bargaining between memory and reality. The word “should” is repeated ten times (emphasis my own):

The Gulf Motel with mermaid lampposts
and ship’s wheel in the lobby should still be
rising out of the sand like a cake decoration.

My brother and I should still be pretending we don’t know our parents

My mother should still be in the kitchenette
of The Gulf Motel

My father should still be in a terrycloth jacket
smoking

My brother and I should still be playing Parcheesi,
my father should still be alive

My mother’s face should still be resting against
his bare chest like the moon resting on the sea

My brother should still be thirteen, sneaking
rum in the bathroom, sculpting naked women
from sand. I should still be eight years old

I am thirty-eight, driving up Collier Boulevard,
looking for The Gulf Motel, for everything
that should still be, but isn’t.

I think that line perfectly sums up the poem. There is a way that things should be, but as the author explains, are not. The Gulf Motel is no longer there, now the area has underwent luxury development for wealthy Northeners. Logically, he knows that things would have changed regardless and that things must change. That’s just the state of nature. But how on Earth can we handle this contradiction? How can there be such anguish when it seems that only a short time ago life was harmonious?

There should be nothing here I don’t remember…

I had begun thinking about the idea of memory again upon my visit to the 臺南市美術館/Tainan Art Museum. Funnily enough, this was not from an exhibit that dealt with the subject of memory or nostalgia, but rather from the idea of “shared existence” between humans and marine species. To quote the curator:

This exhibition stems from a transnational research project initiated in 2019 by the curator and participating artists titled “Sea-Centric Forms of Socially Engaged Art: Critical Re-Imagination of Intercultural Flow in the Kuroshio Current.” Through research, exhibition, and socially engaged practices, the project seeks to construct a community of shared existence – one that bridges human relationships, the cultural zones of the Kuroshio Current, and marine species. By fostering dialogue and communal artistic exchange, the project transforms these interactions into a profound concern for the marine environment.

Nevertheless, I found something deeply mournful about the exhibition. in particular Chi Kai-yuan The picture I took of the placard didn’t clearly show the characters of their name, so I’m not sure which ones they are.’s 2022 video artwork 〈穿越與流逝〉(Traversing and Passing). The five minute long video depicts a beach, waters lapping up to the shore. Two prosperity turtles are shown, the water lapping onto them. In the room with the projector are two, very small pictures. One depicts a family around an effigy and the other a car in front of a shop. The pictures are hued red and seem like old film pictures.

To me, these pieces gave me the same feelings that Looking for the Gulf Motel did. It feels like the childhood memory in a coastal town. Happy, calm, loving. But at some point, the residents of that little town left. Not for any tragic reason, mind you, but perhaps simply due to better jobs elsewhere. The child, now grown, returns to the town and sees the little prosperity toys that he would carry around still on the shore, lapped by the waves.

There should be nothing here I don’t remember…

I often think of the town, or more accurately the former town, of Pine Point, Northwest Territories. Although I still have not seen the web documentary Welcome to Pine Point, which is where much of the town’s fame comes from, I have frequently listened to the song Pine Point by PUP. There’s an utter grief in this song, as it focuses around the tragedy of losing a place, and all that there is left is a cemetery. I highly recommend listening to it, I think just hearing it can describe it a lot better than I can.

There should be nothing here I don’t remember…

One of my longest running obsessions has been genealogy AKA family history.. I’m not exactly sure why. I’m not close with my extended family, I’d probably hazard a guess and say they don’t particularly like me. However, there is something so rewarding about learning and remembering a person whose name had been forgotten to time, whose name is only recorded in a small, messy scribal hand in a water stained church book.

But most importantly, it’s also a history of a place. I was born and raised in Fort Wayne, Indiana, the second largest city in the state. As much as I have ragged on my hometown throughout my life, I am undeniably connected to it. My family has at least been here since the 1850s, and all of my great-grandparents were born in Fort Wayne. Going to Catholic Cemetery is a family reunion: it doesn’t take long to find a gravestone of someone who I’m related to, directly or otherwise. Yet by looking through census records and vital records, one can easily see the effects of the Rust Belt on the city. As a tangent, I’d also highly recommend checking out the game Night in the Woods if you want something that deals with this theme (and is just a fantastic game in its own right). Many of my ancestors and their siblings worked in the knitting mills or in the automotive factories, but now those are all but gone. They are now either derelict buildings, destroyed and gentrified, or been given some new functionality as a way to revitalize the town.

If my ancestors saw the city that they grew up in, would they still remember it?