“It is not properly speaking to say: there are three times: the past, the present, and the future.
Perhaps it would be more accurate to say: there are three times: the present of the past, the present of the present, and the present of the future; for these three kinds of time exist in our mind, and I do not see them elsewhere.”
Saint Augustine, Confessions
— What do you mean… or… what does our master mean by “a mirror with time”?
— We mean by that that memory never gives back exactly what once was. An ordinary mirror immediately restores an appearance. Memory, however, allows duration to pass through the image. It preserves, but by transforming. What it reflects has passed through layers of life, affects, forgettings, displacements. That is why a memory is never a simple reproduction. It has already become something else at the very moment it returns.
— So memory distorts?
— Not only. “Distort” would suggest an error. Memory works more like a depth. The mirror shows a surface. Memory adds the invisible thickness of lived experience. Two beings may have seen the same scene without carrying the same memory of it, because time never passes through two consciousnesses in an identical way.
— Then the mirror would be without a past?
— It retains nothing. Each image disappears there as soon as it appears. Memory, by contrast, preserves traces. Even what seems forgotten remains somewhere, mingled with other images, other voices. Bergson said that the past never ceases to exist: it continues to coexist with the present under another form.
— Then memory would be a kind of delayed reflection?
— In a way… a sort of reflection that has lived in the shadows before returning to us. And when it returns, it brings with it all the times it has crossed through. That is why certain memories resemble climates more than images. A smell, a light, the sound of footsteps, almost anything, can sometimes reopen an entire world.
— As though time continued to look through us?
— Perhaps even more than that… as though we ourselves were made of ancient gazes silently continuing to seek a form within the present.
[…]
the figures seek less to break their prison than to make it traversable.
Félix’s Notebook (third part)
Where Félix, observing with sustained attention and setting aside a small part of reason, slowly discovers… though not without a certain pleasure… what for a long time… he had simply refused to see.
A hat appears in the upper part of the image, slightly to the left of the center. Only a fragment of it can be seen, sporadically, it seems to me, yet this is enough for it to act almost like a sign rather than a mere article of clothing. It seems to float or emerge from afar, perhaps from another time… my own mind, too, seems to float somewhat… behind the ropes and the masses of waves, as though the figure of the character overflowed the limits of its visible body.
The fact that it is partially concealed seems important to me. The hat appears to belong to a space slightly different from that of the suspended figure… evidently this is Pinocchio the Other. It gives the impression of a presence larger than what the scene directly shows. Almost as though the figure… which it represents… or… which represents it… were already dispersed throughout the image.
Within this universe, the detail immediately becomes charged with meaning, because this hat, like that of the Moon Child, does not seem to me to be a neutral accessory. It could function as a perceptive extension, a kind of external organ, a fragment of night carried upon the head. Here, the fact that it appears separated or displaced from the body could simultaneously suggest several things:
the character crosses the network of ropes, yet a part of him remains elsewhere; the figure overflowing its own location… or else the hat watches or observes attentively before the character himself perceives…
There is almost an effect of “anticipated presence.” As though the hat preceded the one who wears it. This strongly echoes your idea of figures living within unfolded time, where certain manifestations arrive before their own apparent origin.
And above all: this hat emerges above the storm. It is not swallowed by it. Passing through the columns and visibly moving toward Pinocchio the Other, it remains visible as a point of persistence within the chaos of lines and waves. A small island of stable form within a world carried away by forces.
the figures seek less to break their prison than to make it traversable.
Félix’s Notebook (third part)
Where Félix, observing with sustained attention and setting aside a small part of reason, slowly discovers… though not without a certain pleasure… what for a long time… he had simply refused to see.
A hat appears in the upper part of the image, slightly to the left of the center. Only a fragment of it can be seen, sporadically, it seems to me, yet this is enough for it to act almost like a sign rather than a mere article of clothing. It seems to float or emerge from afar, perhaps from another time… my own mind, too, seems to float somewhat… behind the ropes and the masses of waves, as though the figure of the character overflowed the limits of its visible body.
The fact that it is partially concealed seems important to me. The hat appears to belong to a space slightly different from that of the suspended figure… evidently this is Pinocchio the Other. It gives the impression of a presence larger than what the scene directly shows. Almost as though the figure… which it represents… or… which represents it… were already dispersed throughout the image.
Within this universe, the detail immediately becomes charged with meaning, because this hat, like that of the Moon Child, does not seem to me to be a neutral accessory. It could function as a perceptive extension, a kind of external organ, a fragment of night carried upon the head. Here, the fact that it appears separated or displaced from the body could simultaneously suggest several things:
the character crosses the network of ropes, yet a part of him remains elsewhere; the figure overflowing its own location… or else the hat watches or observes attentively before the character himself perceives…
There is almost an effect of “anticipated presence.” As though the hat preceded the one who wears it. This strongly echoes your idea of figures living within unfolded time, where certain manifestations arrive before their own apparent origin.
And above all: this hat emerges above the storm. It is not swallowed by it. Passing through the columns and visibly moving toward Pinocchio the Other, it remains visible as a point of persistence within the chaos of lines and waves. A small island of stable form within a world carried away by forces.
