Human beings can understand nothing without images, said the eccentric called Thomas Aquinas, and I guess he was right to insist at the same time that these images are mostly phantoms. So if you're working with your memory on the vacuity of substances, expressions, purity of faith, prohibition of imagination and so forth, you're probably restructuring the smoky images you have of them in your mind. And these appear, or fail to appear, at the unlikeliest of moments, severing and transforming possibilities you see of the world, and for yourself. To think outside images, is to think within them. To be outside memory, is to think within forgettable frames.
Consider, I mean what you call the 'past', in terms of these simultaneous processes of inclusion and exclusion. And you invariably get to think of yourself as of 'now' as obese, inactive and static, a melancholy witness to unchanging differentiation of the world around you. Call this thinking historical if you like. But you know there lies a serious flaw in those pristine pasts imagined, as they were, those mosaic of images, separated only by the reverberating smoke mists above the swamps of your mind, those that try to call themselves hoarse the perfect picture, simultaneously running along with that strange neurophysiologic logic of the thing called memory that exterminates any images and anything that cannot be easily understood.
Ah, observe how Walter Benjamin defines this position wonderfully:
The true picture of the past whizzes by. Only as a picture, which flashes its final farewell in the moment of its recognizability, is the past to be held fast... For it is an irretrievable picture of the past, which threatens to disappear with every present, which does not recognize itself as meant in it.
(Benjamin, Thesis V, On the Concept of History, 1940)
Because, perhaps, and also because, you exist as a gaze that's incapable of convoking its own shades, images and shadows, the harsh voices, the wailing cries, the cults of appearances and disappearances...
Consider, I mean what you call the 'past', in terms of these simultaneous processes of inclusion and exclusion. And you invariably get to think of yourself as of 'now' as obese, inactive and static, a melancholy witness to unchanging differentiation of the world around you. Call this thinking historical if you like. But you know there lies a serious flaw in those pristine pasts imagined, as they were, those mosaic of images, separated only by the reverberating smoke mists above the swamps of your mind, those that try to call themselves hoarse the perfect picture, simultaneously running along with that strange neurophysiologic logic of the thing called memory that exterminates any images and anything that cannot be easily understood.
Ah, observe how Walter Benjamin defines this position wonderfully:
The true picture of the past whizzes by. Only as a picture, which flashes its final farewell in the moment of its recognizability, is the past to be held fast... For it is an irretrievable picture of the past, which threatens to disappear with every present, which does not recognize itself as meant in it.
(Benjamin, Thesis V, On the Concept of History, 1940)
Because, perhaps, and also because, you exist as a gaze that's incapable of convoking its own shades, images and shadows, the harsh voices, the wailing cries, the cults of appearances and disappearances...
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