Memory
The sun had gone. Nature was resuming its reign over the Bois... [the ensuing transformation]... helped me to understand how paradoxical it is to seek in reality for the pictures that are stored in one’s memory, which must inevitably lose the charm that comes to them from memory itself and from their not being apprehended by the senses. The reality that I had known no longer existed.
Marcel Proust (1913)
Proust’s celebration of memory has received curiously little credit for the light it shines on a difficult subject. Early in his penetrating exploration comes the quote with this essential point phrased as memory adding a ‘charm’ - ambiguously both a warmth of familiarity, and a spell cast - which never was part of the sensation. This gap, between the composed simulacrum of memory and its counterpart, is
profound.
The gap between phenomena and noumena is greater, but nothing can be said about the latter.
The lost counterpart was present and of the senses; the remembered item is neither; a spell is cast which relentlessly insists that a past can be restored to a present. In very different ways
photography
A page on the
photograph as relic.
and
meditation
Separating thought, and therefore its close ally memory, from sensation.
both seek to bridge this same gap. The former purports to transport us back beyond the
divide,
Snapshots seen as capturing a onetime present.
by offering a visual sensation from the far side, but it is a sensation actually immersed in a new present; while the latter confronts memory, asking it to step aside and allow us access to present sensations - all too often, so invited, memory dissembles, feigning acquiescence, by surreptitiously and immediately
cloaking
A little more on that cloaking.
our sensations with its charms.
The quote is from page 462 of Swann’s Way in the three volume edition of Remembrance of Things Past which was translated by Scott Moncrieff and, with revisions by Terence Kilmartin, was published by Chatto & Windus in 1981.
The photograph was taken on Kirkcudbright golf course at the winter solstice. Proust’s insight is to see that we cannot actually set together three things: a photograph, what it was a photograph of at that time, and our memory of what was there. What was there is irrecoverable. And even the photograph shows that the way the picture documents its subject, is not at all what we have in memory, for in memory the origins are entangled in a complex skein of feelings and reactions that can have no direct concrete representation, however much, as in the above photo, we may hope that it has indicated our feelings of that time.
Above, hovering on blue introduces a link: click to go, move away to stay.
Saturday 16th March 2024
...guide to this site