Rememory

Rememory is Toni Morrison's word for a phenomenon that ordinary language does not quite capture: the past that does not go when the present moves on. In Beloved (1987), Sethe uses it to describe something more disorienting than memory—a persistence in the world itself, in places and objects and bloodlines, independent of anyone actively remembering. A rememory is not something you summon; it is something that finds you, that ambushes the present with what it never fully processed, that re-happens to people who did nothing to summon it because it never quite stopped happening. Morrison meant the concept specifically and traumatically: the wound of slavery persisted in places, in gestures, in the inherited shudder of descendants who had not been there. But the concept turns out to describe something far more general about how the past inhabits systems that accumulate it—and it describes, with eerie precision, what a language model's training data does to the people it subsequently encounters.