I'm trying, I'm trying, but... I can't not mention the madeleine -
music is evocative, but taste and smell can puncture memory and have
it spilling out like almost nothing else. Certain smells of paint
and iron vividly take me back to various ship journeys I made when I
was a small child. The complication is that the stories then made
from memory are almost always fiction, whether that fiction is true
or not, some function of the human drive to narrative as a way of
making meaning, patterning what is otherwise perhaps disturbingly
random: so the past is always made in the present and present in the
present. (And maybe writing does this by definition, as Doug said).
Perhaps words, written one after the other, merely present an
illusion of linear time, like time itself? In any case, one of my
many failings, I can't but think of time as a human centred
invention: without meaning (which is also a human invention) unless
marked by the narrative of a life. Sometimes poetry seems to me to
be an insight through those markers to an eternal, the present in all
its plenitudes, past and future all together.
Thinking also of Andrei Tarkovsky's notebooks, published as
"sculpting time", which is how he thought of the art of filmmaking
and perhaps explains why he's the most poetic of directors.
Best
A
--
Alison Croggon
Blog
http://alisoncroggon.blogspot.com
Editor, Masthead
http://au.geocities.com/masthead_2/
Home page
http://www.users.bigpond.com/acroggon/
|