Every memory is moaning softly inside me. Don’t leave me, begs the past. Don’t abandon us, weep the images. Time itself is talking to me, admonishing me. I draw up my legacy against its inexorable tide.
—Agnès Desarthe, Chez Moi. Penguin Books, 2008
Tag: memory
“Becoming is an antimemory.”
— Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
“Being estranged from one’s own life can be how a world reappears, becoming odd. You might become conscious of a possibility once it has receded. In Mrs. Dalloway’s consciousness, other people, other possibilities, flicker as memory. To become conscious of possibility can involve mourning for its loss. You can feel the sadness of what could have been, but was not to be. Maybe we realize: it would have been possible to live one’s life in another way. We can mourn because we didn’t even realize that we gave something up. The shape of a life can feel like a past tense; something we sense only after it has been acquired.”
— Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life
“We are our memory,
we are that chimerical museum of shifting shapes,
that pile of broken mirrors”— Jorge Luis Borges, “Cambridge” 1969
Time percolates, sometimes filtering through and sometimes not. The structure of percolation helps us to understand memory: things back up and create obstructions in a blocked corridor.
Michel Serres, The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies
“Memory, wherever you touch it, gives pain,”
— George Seferis, tr. by Rex Warner, from Selected Poems;“Memory I,”
“There is so little to remember of anyone—an anecdote, a conversation at table. But every memory is turned over and over again, every word, however chance, written in the heart in the hope that memory will fulfill itself, and become flesh, and that the wanderers will find a way home, and the perished, whose lack we always feel, will step through the door finally and stroke our hair with dreaming, habitual fondness, not having meant to keep us waiting long.”
— Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping
“Time lives in the landscape. It can be seen there, read there. Before memory there is the view. To remember is literally to see the physical traces left on the body of a place by the events of the past. But there is no body of a place that is not on some level linked to the human body.”
— Achille Mbembe, The Critique of Black Reason (124)
countervisuality 