One Step Removed from Ash
October 22, 2025 at 12:04AMFor the Los Angeles Review of Books, Vanessa Holyoak remembers the house she grew up in, recalling detail after detail of the home she lost to the Pacific Palisades fire in January, 2025. Holyoak confronts losing several years of journals and mulls what remains after the fragile proof of her existence was destroyed by fire. She fears forgetting this beloved and formative place as fallible memory fades. “I want to dwell here, in the dream of the house,” she writes, feeling the cool Saltillo tile underfoot as she surveys the ephemera of her family’s existence, accumulated over 30 years and lost on “one windy night.”
Three months later, Blanchot’s words come to me like an incantation: “When all is said, what remains to be said is the disaster. Ruin of words, demise of writing, faintness faintly murmuring: what remains without remains.” The disaster marks language’s limit. It is the night that leaves writing in ruins. Here in the space left behind by the disaster, the remains without remains, there is nothing to write. A series of riddles pulses in me: How to write about the ruins of writing. How to rewrite an archive if the archive has always been destined for disappearance. What is this impulse to make marks at any and all cost, even if, perhaps, our marks can only ever be written in invisible ink? And yet the simultaneous disappearance of my written and familial archive has spurred me to make new marks, to trace the absence of an archive turned to ashes, to write the disaster in order to begin again.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/10/21/one-step-removed-from-ash/
via IFTTT
Watch