The departed and the present

“To forget is one of the great forms of freedom.”

Khalil Gibran

Internally unsettled, thrown off balance by Lucian’s question, Ignatius remained silent for a long while. The word consultation echoed in a loop in his mind. One hears the rustle of a coat, the faint crackle of a wave. Fleeing the word, he raised one hand in which lay a piece of rope, like a severed umbilical cord. Slightly trembling, he asked a question in a sincere voice.

— But then, if it is man who passes… what becomes of memory? What becomes of our memories? Do they remain somewhere, or do they pass as well?
Lucian nodded.
He smiled. This kind of question, he liked — because it came from life, not from a concept. He leaned slightly forward, briefly looking behind him before fixing his gaze on Ignatius, as though about to reveal something both secret and very simple.
– Ah… memory. Yes, you are right to bring it into the play.
Because memory is precisely what plays between what has passed and what continues to live. It is a temporal in-between. It keeps and transforms; it does not freeze. We believe memory preserves. No: it recreates. Each time we remember, we replay the scene, shifting it slightly. We restore playfulness between the event and ourselves. That is why two people who lived the same moment never remember it in the same way: because each has made their own passage. If memory were only storage, it would be dead.
– It would be a wax museum, frozen in a time that no longer is…
– Exactly… But living memory is the one that reinvents. It replays the past in the present, adjusting it to what we have become. It is memory in act, not in stone.
– So… when we say it is man who passes, it does not mean he vanishes.
– No, he leaves traces, folds, gaps.
And it is there, in those gaps, that memory works.
– It keeps the passage open…
– Precisely… You see, when we lose someone, we think the bond is broken. But in truth, the bond passes differently.
– Sometimes one feels it in a word, a gesture, a dream… or an image!
– Indeed — something that replays the bond without repeating it. It is no longer the same presence, but neither is it absence.
It is the in-between of memory and life.
This is where memory operates: in the symbolic passage between the one who is gone and the present.
And then there is collective memory.
A society, too, passes.
It moves from one frame to another, from one play to another. And what it calls “memory” is its way of replaying its wounds and its glories.
Sometimes it forgets how to play: it repeats, ruminates, blocks.
– In that case, what should be done?
– We must reopen the play, reintroduce passage, allow something old to circulate differently. That is what it means to remember: to let the old circulate in the present without imprisoning it. And if you wish, we might say that memory is what prevents passage from becoming pure forgetting — but also what prevents memory from becoming pure repetition.
It is the in-between of sameness and forgetting, of recall and life.
So… time does not pass; man passes. And in his passing, he leaves a thread — a bit of memory, a bit of play. That thread may be taken up by others, rewoven, and in this way life transmits itself. Not as something one keeps, but as a movement one replays.
He fell silent.
– As a movement one replays… Lucian, may I ask you two questions?
– Please do…
– Tell me… what did you mean yesterday… when you spoke of consultation? And… why did you not answer me about the drawings?