memory is repetition. sure. but it is repetition with a difference. it is not recitation. it is repetition that creates a felt variation in the way things appear. repetition is what makes possible novelty. memory needs to be imagination. transfiguration. now, i saw it. the whole thing. an endlessly re-creating, reenacting memory mechanism. a rotating eternity. self-generating and self-altering.
we do not make ourselves. we cannot remake ourselves through memory. such was the fallacy driving my memory theater. we are not self-constituting beings. we are constituted through the vast movement of history, of which we are the largely quiescent effects. sundry epiphenomena. symptoms of a millennia-long malaise whose cause escapes us. memory theater cannot be reduced to my memory, but has to reach down into the deep immemorial strata that contain the latent collective energy of the past. the dead who still fill the air with their cries. the memory theater would have to immerse itself in the monumentally forgotten.

 hmm. are you going to give me the gingerbread man in your pocket, or are you going to forget til later when you're back home blogging your self-generating memory?



memory theater,
simon critchley