What Is a Souvenir

Contents

1. The picture under the word
2. Three cases the picture cannot hold
3. The neighbours
4. What the foundation holds
5. At the till
6. The first mark that is yours
7. The table by the ferry
8. What it costs
9. An ordinary Tuesday

Ruth buys the tile on her last morning, from a table by the ferry, for about the price of a coffee. It is blue and white and the size of her palm, with a lighthouse on it and the name of the town under the lighthouse in capitals. She has been in the town nine days. She has not been to the lighthouse, because the road was shut. The man at the table wraps the tile in yesterday’s newspaper, and then wraps a second one, identical, for the woman behind her in the queue. At home Ruth props hers against the splashback over the kettle, and for six years, each time the kettle boils, she is briefly there.

The word is the French for a memory, and English took it for the object. A souvenir is something to remember by.

Underneath the word is a picture, and it has been good enough to run on. The place goes into the object, so a tile with the right lighthouse on it is a little of the town, brought back. The more local the object, the more of the place it holds. And the object is for the owner’s memory of the trip, so to lose it is to lose a piece of the trip.

Three cases the picture cannot hold

The seam runs through where the picture puts the keeping. In the first case the keeping differs and the tiles do not. In the second it is not in the town the tile is from. In the third it is not lost when the tile is. A property of the tile does none of those things. A reading does all three: it is in the person, it needs her own record, and it survives the loss of the thing that cued it.

The neighbours

Several earlier pieces stand close, and a reader could think I am repeating one.

What Is Memory is the nearest. It owns the point that a memory is a mark in the present, made again at each reading, and that what happened was never in anyone’s custody. I rely on it throughout. What I add is a question it does not ask: which act made the mark that stands on the splashback, and why its owner reads it as the mark of another. What Is Proof owns the present mark read against other present marks, which settles a reader’s expectation and reaches nothing behind the record. A souvenir is not offered to settle anything; I take the sort of present mark that is made in bulk, by people who were not there, and sold at the place. What Is a Copy owns the point that the original was never the standard. I do not use it: the tile is a copy of nothing the owner made. What Is a Lullaby took a word that names a tune together with a hearer’s record of it. I do not say a souvenir is that pair, and I do not take the reading falling as the record lengthens. What I take is the swap: the same object in two hosts, and what the object holds before either of them has done anything to it.

What the foundation holds

Five statements do the work, and I use them as the foundation states them. An act is a process, and it may or may not generate an artifact. An artifact is an imperfect historical mark made in relation to an exemplar, and history is the artifacts, present, surrounding and revisable. The Past is inaccessible, and the abundance of present records makes it appear otherwise (R9). Records update expectation forward and never re-open (R2). The human experiences only the quotient, and the denominator it is met against comprises subconscious prediction and ideas (R8 and P4).

One consequence of the first pair needs saying before the argument starts. A trip is a long stretch of acts: walking, eating, waiting at a shut road. Some of those acts leave marks, such as a ticket, a photograph, a receipt for the room. Many leave none, and an act that leaves no mark is still an act that was done. The question about a souvenir is which of these it is.

At the till

Take the tile on the table, before Ruth has touched it. Ask who made it and when. It was formed, glazed and printed in a workshop before her flight was booked, by people who had not met her, and it travelled to the table in a box with four hundred others. It has marks on it: a lighthouse, a name, a faint glaze fault in one corner. Each of those is the mark of some act, and none of those acts is a day of Ruth’s week.

R9 is the reason that matters. Nothing in the present reaches the Past, and R2 adds that what is recorded is not re-opened. The week is done, and what it made it made then, in the marks the week left. Nothing bought afterwards is added to that set from outside, and the tile was already a made thing when the week began.

The first mark that is yours

The first mark on the tile that belongs to Ruth is the one her hand made on the last morning. She picked it up, she paid, she took the newspaper parcel. That is an act, and it is a small one, and it is hers. It left a mark: a sale, a lighter purse, a tile that is now in a bag. This is the artifact the souvenir is. What the trip left, it left in a different set of marks, in the ticket, the photograph taken from the ferry rail, the friend who was there, and in the many things the nine days did that nothing recorded.

After the buying, the tile gathers marks of the keeping. She props it, and the grease from the kettle reaches it in a month. A chip comes off the corner in year two. One winter she writes the dates on the back in pencil. Each of those is an artifact of an act of hers, made later and smaller than the trip, and these are the marks that can differ between two identical tiles in two kitchens.

Now the reading. R8 says the human experiences only the quotient. The tile in Ruth’s kitchen is the numerator, and the denominator is what she holds: P4 says that comprises subconscious prediction, which the nine days have trained, and the ideas she has of the town. The woman from the train meets her tile against a denominator trained on one afternoon and a different set of ideas. Her sister meets the spare against a denominator with no days of the town in it. One object, three quotients, and the difference is wholly on the lower line.

The table by the ferry

Go back to the table. The stock was printed in one run and is sold in one place. Each tile on it is a present record of the town, and not one was made by anyone’s visit. R9 has a second clause: an abundance of present records makes the Past look reachable. Here is the abundance, tray by tray, set out at the point where the feeling of reaching is at its strongest, on a last morning, with a ferry to catch.

I do not say the man at the table is arranging this. He is a host with a living to make, and the arrangement is the old one: a place people want to carry something away from, and a thing that can be carried. The foundation says nothing about his motives and the argument does not need them. What the arrangement does is fix a price on the cue, which is the price at the till, and not on the trip, which was paid for elsewhere and in other coin.

The foundation separates two jobs inside any backward-facing feeling. One is an evaluation, aimed at a present artifact and read against its exemplar; it can succeed and gives a usable update. The other is a reaching, aimed at the Past itself, and it has no completion condition. Ruth at the kettle is doing both. The reading of the tile is hers to do and can be done well: is it the tile she meant to buy, does she still want it met each morning? The brief feeling of being there is the reaching, and it is hers to have. It is a good minute. Nothing here says it is a mistake. It is a present reading with the feeling of access that records give, and it does not touch the week.

The tile is the one thing in the house most like the trip. It can be replaced for the price of a coffee, and the trip cannot.

What it costs

The first cost is the one in the pull quote. If the tile breaks, an identical one can be bought online, and the cue is restored exactly. That makes the loss cheap, and it also shows what the thing was. The week is not on sale. No second tile makes a second week.

The second is that a souvenir cannot be made better by being dearer or more local. An expensive replica made by a local craftsman is the mark of the same kind of act as the tile, a buying, and it is met against the same denominator. It may be a better object. It does not hold more of the week, because the tile did not hold any.

The third is smaller and, for some people, it is the one that stings. The tile does not tell you whose week it was. Ruth cannot give it to her sister and send the nine days with it. She can tell her about them, and that is a new act with its own mark in the sister’s record.

An ordinary Tuesday

1. Keep it or bin it on the reading, not on the week. Ask whether you still want it met each morning. That is the evaluation, and it can be answered. The trip is not at stake in the answer.
2. Binning is an act with its own mark. It sits beside the buying and does not reach the nine days. Do it without ceremony, or with some, as you like.
3. Put your own marks on it. Write the dates on the back. Those are artifacts of your keeping, and they are the only marks on the tile that no one else’s tile has.
4. Look for the trip’s own marks. The ticket, the photograph, the room receipt, the friend who was there. They are marks of acts done in the week, and they sit in a different drawer from the souvenirs.
5. Read a gift for what it is. A souvenir given to you is the mark of the giver’s buying. It cannot tell you about the place. It tells you that a host stood somewhere with money in a hand, picked this one up, and brought it home in a bag. Those are checkable acts of theirs.
6. Tell the week. If you want someone to have it, tell them. Telling is a new act and a new mark in their record, and it is the only way I know of for another person to hold something of the trip.