"What force in the memory! It's something I do not know why, worthy of inspiring a holy terror, my God, for its depth and infinite multiplicity. [...]
[...] Look in my memory as there are fields, caverns, caves innumerable, infinitely populated with countless things of all kinds who live there ... "
(San Augustine. The Confessions )
amazed and marvel at the mysterious force that fails to grasp the whole and we call memory. He marvels, but also fears: "worthy of inspiring a holy terror" , and St. Augustine is not mistaken. Insightful and sharp as a few express the feeling that induces the faculty of memory, a mixture of admiration and fear. We admire the scope of the report, nothing is lost, everything is stored, and when something we thought was lost in oblivion, appears sometimes unexpectedly. We realize then that we had forgotten, and therefore self-to-remember, we become aware that never lost that memory. The memories are always there, lurking, ready to jump as predators on the hunt for our helpless emotions. Through it we fear memory, fear their "depth and infinite multiplicity" , we fear the terrifying possibility of being trapped, as in a well in these "countless caves populated to infinity" , caves that can reach to become a scenario of Piranesi's prisons which is impossible to leave, impossible architecture, spaces nightmare.
need the memory, without her knowledge would not be possible. But we survived thanks to oblivion. These "gaps memory ", following St. Augustine, make the existence. Remembering and forgetting are two sides of same coin. Nothing would be without memory, a mind empty of all content on a perpetual decline is nothing to know, a terrible panic, no cause of action, but the runaway memory, without the restraint of oblivion, without the gaps that give it structure, is something monstrous that I could not cause if not terror.
Nobody has been able to address this issue as well as Borges in one of his most famous stories: Funes the memoirist. is well known and highly recommend its reading to those who do not know. Ireneo Funes, a strange, moody, have an accident that is about to cost him his life. It is the turning point of a transformation that takes place in Funes, is unable to forget from that moment nothing, absolutely nothing. Funes's memory is prodigious, absolute, lived in a perpetual present, vast and infinite, pregnant with innumerable details he was condemned to not forget. Funes life, if it is that you can call it life, flowed in these caves populated to infinity: "To think is to forget differences, generalize, to abstract. In the teeming world of Funes there was if not details, almost immediate ", Borges account. After reading that the portrait of Borges Funes us, that is presented as monstrous someone capable of inspiring true terror, because Funes is if the image of eternity, the image of death itself.
San Augustine intends to exceed the same memory to reach God. To me, I do not believe in God, only I have the memory. Unable to reach the paradise of the righteous, I run the danger of plunging into an inferno made of memories, caverns travel the rest of my life, but I still get forgotten, Funes has caught me yet, but who knows? In any case, as the replicant Roy would say, are memories "will be lost in time like tears in rain" .
Valencia, 19 December. Late, and for that very violent, cold winter finally descends upon a warm Mediterranean city (or winter, no more)
PD The man with the briefcase, dark confident recruiter, you may finally sit on the bench. Someone, vigilant, may begin to fade COLOR.
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