Being / With: a Gratitude, a Love Letter, From One Half of a Duet

By Nicki Pombier

As an oral historian, memory is my material and interviewing is my craft. I ask someone to tell me of themselves and then I listen, riding the current of a conversation I’m co-constructing, both of us boat, rower and river all at once. And then what happened? And what was that like?  

Picture this: two people in a room, wired up with mics they forget, one remembering aloud to the wondering other, an hour passes or more, all the sound in the room absorbed to audio, a .wav file you transliterate later to a skyline of trees. You can see the silence in an audio file, where the spikes of sound flatline. But what is the texture of that silence, its cadence and meaning? What does the recorder miss, and isn’t that as much the stuff of memory as what’s said? What you choose to keep, or what you cannot say?

What to do with silence is an existential question to an oral historian. Our reliance on speech acts is right there in our name. In 2012, I had my second son. Jonah was born with multiple disabilities, none known to me while pregnant or, in point of fact, before—I had never had an encounter with someone with intellectual disabilities until I gave birth to him. Among my many uncertainties was the fundamental question: will he be able to speak? Among the many attendant questions was one for my craft: how can I do oral history with people who do not remember aloud, or narratively? I wanted to extend the radical inclusivity at the heart of my practice—our fundamental conviction that everyone has a lived experience that is worthy of history, that is historical, that has something to teach—to intellectual disability. This would mean finding new ways to work, and this would lead me to Nichole Canuso.

Nichole and I met when I trained her to interview people living at Selinsgrove Center, a state-run institution for people with intellectual disabilities, as part of Temple University’s project, Here. Stories. What began there grew into a conversation across years, projects, performances, pandemic; a duet between our two practices, dance and oral history, lines I’m trying, in this writing, to follow or twine.

I first took part in Being / With: Home in September 2020 and was wholly unprepared for what it would do for me, or how it would undo me. Throughout the year since, I’ve been actively reflecting on what this work has to teach me, as an oral history artist eager to expand beyond the interview and to bring into historical practice the ways of knowing that do not require speech or emerge as narrative. In March of 2021, I attended a second Being/With: Home, and in October, came to Philadelphia to experience it in person, at the Evangelical Church of the Trinity in South Philly. I’ve journaled, I’ve interviewed Nichole, I’ve talked to friends and colleagues and my therapist, I’ve even scored my own personal ritual, and with this brief writing, I’m continuing to try and urge what I’ve experienced through the work into words. My hope in sharing what this work made possible for one participant is to offer a microcosm of its big power, but I find myself constrained by the limits of language and reminded of the needs that Being / With meets—of how much of life is untranslatable to words, and how beautiful its gift, to allow the intimacy of an encounter that needs no words to name.

Being / With creates an experience so alchemic as to be, like fire, its own new form. Somewhere at the shifting touchpoints of memory and story, speech and silence, interview and dance, improvisation and script, witnessing and being witnessed, intimacy and privacy, Being / With is a form of play so serious it sent me, each of the three times I took part, to some new edge I didn’t know was in me. What it showed me anew is that to remember is to create. It is not mere retrieval, though it can include some rummaging, some choosing what to bring forward from the drawers of our past. What Being With constructs is an experience of co-creative, reciprocal remembering, of simultaneously witnessing and being witnessed, of being explicitly invited to choose what to keep and what to share, and to experience the freedom in constraint; to release the need to fully know or be fully known, to allow instead your own mystery, and that of another. To remember is to create, and the remembering self is always located in the present, making the experience of remembering a kind of time travel, a being in the past and in the present, at the same time. This is the only form I’ve experienced that lives in this simultaneity, and makes of it a synapse — a dynamic space in which creation can happen.

And so, the oral historian in me reflects on Being / With for its lessons in form: What if we construct an experience designed to support memory as imagination rather than retrieval? Might we knock loose an unrehearsed version of ourselves to dance with? Might we make of remembering a ritual, a supported experience through which we can release what needs leaving and tend to the wounds of loss?

As a participant in a Being / With duet, I experienced the answers to these intellectual questions about form and process, but what I didn’t expect was to realize the questions I had, in my own life. What had I lost, and what did I need yet to lose? I entered Being / With: Home not knowing I would find, in that hour of deep play, a ritual to end a story I thought was already over. I didn’t know I needed anything like that until Being/With gave new form to my memories, brought them out of the past and into my living room, where there he leaned, against my doorpost, needing a goodbye.

Picture this: a living room overfull with books and ephemera, clamshells upturned and cupping candles, a tiny plastic rocking-pig, an origami boat, a taxidermied blowfish. The domestic clutter of an accidental collector. My stuff was a source of immense comfort that terrible year of 2020, each object tactile and familiar and dimensional, a friend, and as I followed the pre-show instructions to choose three things to bring, I could have tapped magic from any. I haphazardly chose these three: a letter my grandma wrote me on birchbark from Canada, a tiny vial of ashes, and an old glass ketchup bottle with a jagged black stone inside it the size of a small fist, way too big to fit down the glass neck. The latter I found on a meaningful beach on a meaningful day, and though the events that transpired there and thereafter have since been a source of secret grief, I keep the bottle, pregnant with its impossible rock, in pride of place, where I can always see it. Although the bottle holds a secret I suppose, in bringing it, I must have wanted to be asked.

And I was. My partner was a woman named Joan, of an older generation than mine. Prompted by our audio guides, we brought our objects into play with one another, making a small, puppety dance with them. Joan’s objects were cute, figurative: coasters with sheep huddled under red umbrellas, a Ben Franklin bobble-head, a toy elephant. I don’t remember what she told me about them, but my experience with Joan was less about her than having a curious witness, someone who could help prompt me down some new interior path, and to offer, with my presence, the same to her. Joan chose to ask me about the glass bottle, and I chose to tell her of its provenance, keeping its secret to myself. But there it was, unspoken yet invoked, a shadow story I wasn’t telling but a parallel path I was mentally traveling. Then came the phone call, came the water.

Water is a recombinant force. Moving to its own lunar urges it has no need for roads or paths or any of the lines we draw on land to guide us, A to B, here to there; wholly untethered from the terrestrial, water moves on moon time, no care for clocks. Bring water to remembering, as Being / With does, and you might free memories from chronology, free remembering from the narrative demands of a timeline to a constellated, associative act; memory as a poem not a paragraph.

Picture this: your partner, this Joan, muted on your computer screen, moving silently around her own living room, while a voice in your ear, an audio guide now both strange and familiar, asks you to see Joan; to witness her without watching, to allow her movements to accrue meaning in relation to you—to your thoughts, your wondering, to your memories.

Have you ever seen someone talking on the phone and doing something with their hands?         

A memory surfaces, unsummoned and sudden: my ex-husband on his phone, chewing the fat pad at the base of his thumbs, a lifelong habit that drove me to irrational rage in our marriage but here, softened by the absence of its subject and buffered by the sweet domestic miming of a silent stranger on her own phone, in her home, here the unbidden image—Jed, chewing his thumbs, phone to ear, for twenty years—was tender, drained of all that old dumb vitriol. A pang of loss entered the room real as a struck chord.

Has anyone ever brought you a gift, and even if not something you understood, it was nice to be thought of?     

Joan in her living room looks up at me, lifts up a watering can shaped like an elephant, pours imaginary water from its trunk.

Think of the many bodies of water you’ve been in. 

I plunge into the waters of Canada, the lake, its shores lined by groves of birch trees, whose bark my grandma peels in long strips to write me letters on.

A leap, and I’m at the fountain in East Towne Mall in Madison, a little girl in the early 80s, running my fingers through the slick water soft with pennies, leaning my small chest against the dark pebbled rim of the fountain which leads me, leap, to more fountains in Madison, municipal fountains downtown which I can taste the chlorinated smell of, which restore my hometown to me as the big place it was to little me, and I could, if prompted, run the gaze of my memory over every edge of this fountain’s ledge and up onto the soft shoulders of the marble banisters lining the capitol steps, which we’d slide down as kids, finding play everywhere. This is memory as Chutes and Ladders, I’ve not played this way before, and before I can slide down another line of sensory thought, I’m brought by my guide back to my living room, to my couch, to my adult self, and then comes the real magic.

Think of a person, a memory person. 

It’s Rich.

Place them in the room. 

Leaning against my doorpost. A place he’s never been and yet I can see him, the long line of him, the look as he looks at me borrowed but separate from memory. This is something else.

Go over to them. 

I move to where he stands. Behind my laptop, which blinks on, unseeing, so what takes place is without witness. Did it happen? It’s the question answered by that glass bottle with the mysterious rock in it. I found it that day, with Rich, at Dead Horse Bay. I won’t say more; I can choose what to keep. It’s enough to say that day was the beginning of a difficult end.

The room fills with water, to your ankles, now your knees, and now your memory person is floating on their back. Cup your hands beneath their head.

This body I haven’t held in years or ever like this, out before me, floating. I can feel the texture of his hair, can see the way his hands might rest on the water, can see each wrinkle of his knuckles, his freckles, the grey red thick of his beard. I can smell the boy smell of his shirt, hear the texture of his voice. No words can replicate voice and description can’t approximate it. More than remembering him, I conjured him; he was there, and though it was a fiction, it was true.

Let their head accrue weight in your hands. And now, say goodbye. 

He was there, and he was not. It was like a death, I was that gutted. I knelt behind my laptop, my face in my hands, weeping freely, unwitnessed but in some shared experience. Held by the care of my audio guide, I gathered myself and came back to my couch, back to the portal of my laptop, where Joan waited, after her own journey I couldn’t know and didn’t need to. The audio guides were there like spirits, holding space for us to choose what to share and what to keep. I didn’t have to describe what had happened, didn’t have to ascribe meaning to it.  I could keep the whole scene private and yet the presence of an unseeing witness gave my experience the weight of reality. It happened.

After Being / With, I was shaken. Rocked. Gobsmacked. Activated. I needed a ritual of my own, I knew, to somehow complete the release that began there in my living room. The next day, I went to Jamaica Bay. The sun was four o’clock low in the late summer sky, muted to a dim orange by smoke from distant fires. September 2020, the American West was burning. I was a whole coast away, in New York City, but knew that elsewhere in that very moment people were fleeing or fled, were holed up in homes, choked by unbreathable air. I walked a gravel path bracketed by cricket-thick grasses, a low slope curled around and up a high mound rising over the Atlantic. The day purred, sun-warm and hazy at waist height with dragonflies and moths, with silent gnats that flit there, rendering air, giving the day a gauze. The park was once a landfill, a mound of unmourned trash now packed down there, invisibly transforming. We are always living with all we don’t see. I come here regularly for the tidal lap where the Atlantic estuaries into salt flats and wetlands that recall to me the marsh I came of age scrambling through in Wisconsin. Wet feet, a ridge of trees I knew as if by name, canoe hijinks, rotting sheds of indeterminate provenance mushroomed with decaying newspapers, an orange velvet couch, graffitied pentagrams and hieroglyphics scrawled by teenagers less nerdy than me. I was wild in the tamest sense, wild as in wilderness. Now a New Yorker, I know the city by its edges, the liminal sites where there is no word for city that isn’t also a song of seagrass. I brought my notebook and a pen and no notion of what I would do, only some strange faith that I’d know when I got there; that being there may be enough. I have no church but I know the ocean, the power of its indifferent witness. Being with it is enough.

What is it about Being / With? The experience of being prompted, being held and moved through space and into memory, did something with memory for me that was radically different than the act of interviewing. Simple verbal prompting and responding seems so pedestrian, now, so clearly insufficient to the imaginative potency of remembering. Being / With was a conjuring. It changed my space by bringing the past into the present in the form of an imagined scene, a fiction that is a narrative truth. It transformed memory from a record of what happened to the creation of a past. It put me in relationship to my past from my present self. I wasn’t remembering the past, I was drawing on memory to create a present, a scene, and in that scene, I could create for my present self an action of resolution, a release, closure. It was a story I needed to tell full to an ending, to myself alone, to release something that I needed to let go of. And in that act there is a transformative possibility, the positioning of remembering in relationship not just to the present, but the future. Because if memory and its meaning is mutable, so too might be the future, or that is the hope. Or rather, that is hope—the capacity to imagine, to imagine something new.

That’s what came to me, at the shoreline. All we couldn’t be, I wrote, over and over in the sand, meaning it for Jed and for Rich both, twin threads in the same story that ended, in my telling, that day in September 2020, at the beach, after Being / With. I watched as the waters came in with their recombinant powers, their restorative and destructive powers, the power to swallow us whole or to hold us. All we couldn’t be, washed away by Jamaica Bay, left blank for all we might become.

Nicki Pombier is an oral historian, writer, and educator, who teaches at the College of Performing Arts at The New School University and in the Oral History Master of Arts program at Columbia University.