Sunday, May 20, 2012
memory
“Memory is not an instrument for surveying the past but its theater. It is the medium of past experience, just as the earth is the medium in which dead cities lie buried. He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging.”
― Walter Benjamin, Berlin Childhood Around 1900
Our memories reside alongside the perpetually evolving past, being filtered, constructed, and forgotten. To return to past moments, events, objects, or people, as Benjamin asserts, is to dig. That is, there is no return without sweat, labour, and dirt. Above all, memory is performative.
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This reminds me of the song Memory, from the musical Cats.
ReplyDeleteFunny how we tend to remember certain things, and the rest we forget faster than you can say the word 'quidditch'
I haven't heard of that song, but will look it up.
ReplyDeleteIf only we could control what we do remember and what we forget!