In our last chat session, I was advised to dwell more on the idea of memory. I went back to my old philosophy book, that of high school, a French system based book by Denis Huisman and André Vergez, in the second volume, that of "Knowledge" I found the lesson that still reoccurs to my mind every now and then.
What I will post here is the main translation of the general memory related lesson, in which I will be taking out later on aspects that could be researched further.
'Our present is not an elusive mathematical point, a line that has no thickness that separates the forever abolished past and the future that still does not exist.
In fact, what we call the present is not an abstract demarcation line but a fragment of the period enveloping the upcoming past and the immediate future.
My present includes what I just did and what I am about to do.
Heidegger says that man is the 'being of the distant' (l'homme est l'être des lointains), a concerned being that projects the future on the present with what has preceded.
Therefore, while a thing at every moment is contemporary of itself, man lasts, that is man remembers.
"Days go by, I remain" writes Appolinaire. Memory appears as a kind of revenge of the human on the escape of days since the human spirit is capable of finding and keeping what is happening. The face of the changing world that is constantly passing by would find some permanence in our memory. It is in this sense that, according to Ibsen, 'we do not possess eternally but what has been lost".
However, these moments that my memory rescues in some sort from the flying days, it does not really resurrect. Memory is not a hallucination: I relive my past, in thinking it as a past. I deny its presence after affirming it. As Lalande says it, memory in the full sense of the word is " a psychic function that consists in reproducing a state of conscience with the past with a character that it is recognized as such by the subject".
Is a sense, through memory, i find my past, i coincide with it; I AM my past; but on the other hand, I put my past as abolished, I handle it from a distance of myself. I have a past. There's here an ambiguity in memory that is at the same time resurrection of the past and positioning the past as past."
This post will be developed further in a another post and will be linked to the context of the project proposal later.
