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    Voyager: Constellations of Memory
    Voyager: Constellations of Memory
    Voyager: Constellations of Memory
    Ebook110 pages1 hour

    Voyager: Constellations of Memory

    By Nona Fernández and Natasha Wimmer

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    About this ebook

    A startling book-length essay, at once grand and intimate, from National Book Award finalist Nona Fernández.

    Voyager begins with Nona Fernández accompanying her elderly mother to the doctor to seek an explanation for her frequent falls and inability to remember what preceded them. As the author stares at the image of her mother’s brain scan, it occurs to her that the electrical signals shown on the screen resemble the night sky.

    Inspired by the mission of the Voyager spacecrafts, Fernández begins a process of observation and documentation. She describes a recent trip to the remote Atacama desert—one of the world’s best spots for astronomical observation—to join people who, like her, hope to dispel the mythologized history of Chile’s new democracy. Weaving together the story of her mother’s illness with story of her country and of the cosmos itself, Fernández braids astronomy and astrology, neuroscience and memory, family history and national history into this brief but intensely imagined autobiographical essay. Scrutinizing the mechanisms of personal, civic, and stellar memory, she insists on preserving the truth of what we’ve seen and experienced, and finding ways to recover what people and countries often prefer to forget.

    In Voyager, Fernández finds a new container for her profound and surreal reckonings with the past. One of the great chroniclers of our day, she has written a rich and resonant book.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateFeb 21, 2023
    ISBN9781644452189
    Voyager: Constellations of Memory
    Author

    Nona Fernández

    Nona Fernández nació en Santiago de Chile en 1971. Es actriz, guionista y escritora. Estudió en la Escuela de Teatro de la Universidad Católica de Chile. Ha publicado el volumen de cuentos El Cielo (2000), las novelas Mapocho (2002, 2019 edición definitiva), Av. 10 de Julio Huamachuco (2007), ambas ganadoras del Premio Municipal de Literatura de Santiago, Fuenzalida (2012), Space Invaders (2013), Chilean Electric (2015), ganadora del premio Mejores obras publicadas del Consejo Nacional del Libro y la Lectura, La dimensión desconocida (2016), distinguida con el Premio Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, que otorga la Feria del Libro de Guadalajara, y el ensayo Voyager (2020). En 2011 fue seleccionada como uno de Los 25 secretos mejor guardados de América Latina en la FIL de Guadalajara. También es autora de las obras de teatro El taller (2012) y Liceo de niñas (2016), ambas estrenadas por su compañía, La Pieza Oscura. Algunos de sus libros han sido traducidos al italiano, el francés, el alemán y el inglés.

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      Book preview

      Voyager - Nona Fernández

      Southern Cross

      My mother has been fainting. Without warning, for no apparent reason, she falls and briefly disconnects. It might be a few minutes or only a few seconds, but when she comes to she can’t remember what’s happened. The moment is tucked away in some hidden corner of her brain. When her eyes open, she generally finds herself under the gaze of a series of strangers trying to help by fanning her or offering her water and tissues. These strangers tend to try to help her piece together the time lost from her memory. You leaned against the wall, you held your head, you vomited, you sat down on the ground, you closed your eyes, you collapsed. A chorus of voices offering up details of the blackout, enough for her to partially recover the scrap of life hidden in a parenthesis in her brain. It upsets my mother not to be able to remember what happened in these spatiotemporal lapses. Falling down in the middle of the street, collapsing in her seat on the bus or in line at the supermarket—these things are less troubling than the lost minutes of lucidity. The black holes that lurk in her everyday memories bother her more than the bruises she collects each time she faints.

      I understand my mother. I have a theory that we’re made up of these everyday memories. It’s not an original idea, but I believe it. The way we wake up, what we have for breakfast, a walk down the street, an unexpected downpour, some annoyance, a surprise in the middle of the day, a story in the paper, a phone call, a song on the radio, the preparation of a meal, the smell from the pot, a complaint filed, a scream heard. Each day and each night lived, year after year, with its full complement of activity and inactivity, upheavals and routines—continuous storing of all this is what translates into personal history. Our archive of memories is the closest thing we have to a record of identity. It’s the only clue to ourselves, the only way to figure ourselves out. I guess that’s why we’re asked to claim it on the therapist’s couch. Sorting through childhood, adolescence, youth; declaring step by step what we’ve lived. Because all of it—everything collected in the kaleidoscope of our hypothalamus—speaks for us. Describes and reveals us. Disjointed fragments, a pile of mirror shards, a heap of the past. The accumulation is what we’re made of.

      I understand my mother. Losing a memory is like losing a hand, an ear, one’s very navel.

      ▶

      On the hospital room monitor I can see my mother’s brain activity. She is lying on a bed, her head sprouting electrodes and her eyes tightly closed. A series of stimuli administered by the doctor triggers electric charges in her brain. A network of hundreds of thousands of neurons interwoven with millions of axons and dendrites exchanging messages via a connective system of multiple transmitters: that’s presumably what I’m seeing translated on the screen. The complexity of what’s going on in there when my mother inhales, exhales, or is illuminated by the soft flickering of a light on her eyelids is indescribable. And when the doctor suggests a simple relaxation exercise, like thinking of a happy moment in her life, her brain really puts on a show. As my mother conjures some unspoken memory, a group of neurons lights up. In his office, the doctor showed us images of active neurons. Though the picture on the monitor doesn’t translate those electric sparks the same way, what I see looks like a starscape. An imaginary chorus of stars twinkling softly in my mother’s brain, soothing her, steadying her nerves during this test. A network stitching together familiar and comforting sensory details, I guess. Smells, tastes, colors, textures, temperatures, emotions. A neuronal circuit like the most complex stellar tapestry. In my mother’s brain, groups of stars constellate in the name of the fond memory lighting them up.

      ▶

      The last time I saw a constellation with any clarity was years ago, up north, far from the polluted skies of Santiago. I spotted Ursa Minor, Orion, the Three Marys, and the Southern Cross, which as a child I was told pointed the way home. I summon the memory and I think about the spectacle surely being staged inside my head.

      A moonless night. The cold of the Atacama Desert creeping up the sleeves of my jacket. Some drowsiness, pent-up fatigue. Soreness in my neck from long minutes of gazing skyward. An astronomer indicating different constellations with a laser pointer, explaining to a group of tourists and me that all those distant lights we see shining above our heads come from the past. Depending how far away they are, we might be talking about billions of years. The glow from stars that may be dead or gone. Reports of their death have yet to reach us and what we see is the glimmer of a life possibly extinguished without our knowing it. Shafts of light freezing the past in our gaze, like family snapshots in a photograph album or the kaleidoscopic patterns of our own memory.

      As we stare open-mouthed at the firmament, immersed in our genuinely Paleolithic ritual, I remember a crazy theory my mother came up with when I was little. I think it was at our Barrancas house in the port city of San Antonio, near the sea, another place you could see the stars. Sitting on the patio, smoking a cigarette on a summer night, my mother said that way up there in the night sky little people were trying to send messages with mirrors. A kind of luminous Morse code, relayed in flashes. I can’t remember why she said it. She probably came up with it in response to some question of mine. What I do remember is that I assumed the messages sent by those little people in the sky were to say hello and assure us they were there, despite the distance and the darkness. Hello, here we are, the little people, don’t forget us. They never stopped signaling. We couldn’t see them during the day, but they were always there. Whether or not we looked up, whether or not we were inside our houses in the city, under a blanket of pollution, blinded by neon lights and billboards, oblivious of what was happening above, the little people’s signals were there and would be there every night of our lives, flashing for us. Lights from the past making a home in our present, lighting up the fearsome darkness like a

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