In memory

 

Each time I reread my notebooks, I am struck by a phenomenon we generally prefer to ignore. I never find exactly the story I had in memory. Not because I have forgotten details—though I sometimes confuse them—but because the text itself seems to have changed, to have rearranged itself, shifted, silently recomposed. It is exactly what happens when I reread a book. I read it again… and the book I had once read has vanished. In its place, another appears—very similar, yet not identical.

This is enough to unsettle anyone.
And yet, it opens an essential path.

Our own story is not a stable text through time; it is a sequence of reconstructions.
Everything I read in this notebook is always an unstable mixture between what speaks in my memory and what I once wrote.
Reading is not traversing a text: it is reorganizing one’s memory.

We naïvely imagine reading as a simple transfer of information: the eye grasps, the memory stores. Nothing could be more false.
Reading is selecting… but it is also forgetting,
reinterpreting, correcting, completing, rescuing isolated moments, recomposing a coherent whole out of fragmentary pieces.

In other words, reading is inventing what we believe we have read.
Each reader reads a different text;
each rereading is the reading of a new story, even if the words remain the same.

In the case of this notebook, this dynamic reaches an extreme level: this story, already unstable in its narration, would be just as unstable in the mind of any improbable reader who encounters it.
The result is a shifting object with a double instability… yet it speaks.

I am astonished, at each rereading, to rediscover scenes I thought I knew and which resemble nothing of what I remembered.

So it was on the day when the entire universe seemed to converse with itself through me. As if I were a mere human seismograph, a consciousness placed there, fragile, on a still-warm rock, scarcely cooled since the dawn of time.
Then I believed that this archipelago, though born of violence, would become a sanctuary.
One day, mosses will come, then insects, then birds and, who knows, perhaps other men.

Tomorrow, I will descend upon the neighbouring island, even more recent, barely visible in the mists.
It would be unreasonable to go alone. But I must, for it is there that the Earth speaks with its mouth of fire. There it tells its story… our story.

The wind moves freely there, lifting clouds of volcanic dust, fine as talc, dark as charcoal, seeping into crevices, erasing tracks, shaping black and grey dunes.
Vegetation is rare, but not absent.
Embedded in the stone, one notices tiny lichens, yellow or orange, forming ancient alphabets on the skin of the rocks. In some places, tufts of dry grass with reddish stalks tremble in the wind, clinging to small pockets of ochre soil gathered between two outcrops of lava.