"what most of us cannot speak of"

"To say, by the same token, that all three inhabit the same 'historical' field -- or, even, that they generate it -- is to hypostatize 'History' out of our very ignorance of the relations between the 'experiences' that produced it.  For 'History' is what we create by scratching the annoyance, the irritation of writing, with its aspirations to logic and order, on memory's uneasy and uncertain discontinuities.

Unlike the sculpture game, then, there is more than one game to play here: psychology, history, art -- which is to say, while 'story' is what we can create, what we can recount, what we can recall, 'History' (as one evokes it in biography, in autobiography) is what most of us do not remember, what most of us cannot speak of."

--Samuel R. Delany, The Motion of Light in Water