English

« Memory is not an archive, but a restless sea where facts sink and resurface according to the tides of our consciousness. What we call a “memory” is often only a reordered echo, a fiction more faithful to our emotions than to raw reality. The past event itself subsists—vast, complex, elusive—even if we retain only a distorted fragment of it. And yet it is this truncated fragment that often guides our choices, shapes our narrative, and alters the future. Thus, between what happened and what we believe we lived, there lies an entire world. A world we inhabit without truly knowing it, but in which each memory becomes a cause and each forgetting, a consequence.»

Walid Neill

– When you speak of memories…
– Yes… when I speak of memories… Clarify your question… if it is one?
– Are you speaking of what you remember or…
– Or?
– Or of what actually happened?
– What difference do you make between the two?
– What happened is much larger than what you might remember… and what you are capable of remembering has largely been the cause of what occurred…
– Tell me… what happened!
– You know it: a text is a place of encounter. This encounter does not occur in physical space, but in the very structure of attention. It even happens that reading reveals aspects of oneself that were not yet accessible. A sentence can give form to a dim intuition.
– Precisely… that Other Pinocchio, that puppet who follows the dog Daemon you told me about… do you remember him… is he an initiatory figure?
– What do you mean by “initiatory”… what do you have in mind?
– «He does not see the world,» you told me then… «he passes through it, without knowing»… He is what I dared to call, by mistake or by a slip: man, the one who listens to the call of Being without being aware of it.»… That was your answer… No need to ask me whether I understood… and you had continued: «He follows not a traced path, but the withdrawal of truth itself, that inverted Ariadne’s thread of which we spoke.»
– An inverted Ariadne’s thread, precisely! That is what our master also told me… It is no longer the thread to exit the labyrinth, but… the thread to rediscover the soul within matter. This daemon–blue dog is not a pet, but the psychopomp guide, the angel of forgetting. He leads the Other Pinocchio not out of the labyrinth, but toward its center, where what he truly is burns.
– You are touching on something very true. The Other Pinocchio here is not dead in the biological sense. He is “dead to the world,” to the world of opinion, representation, spectacle. He has entered the belly of the great fish not as a victim, but as
– You are touching on something very true. The Other Pinocchio here is not dead in the biological sense. He is “dead to the world,” to the world of opinion, representation, spectacle. He has entered the belly of the great fish, this theater or circus, not as a victim, but as a ferryman.
– I am not sure I understand.
– At every moment, the way we envisage things and events influences them… Nothing can occur independently—or, to put it differently, everything acts, certainly to varying degrees, upon everything else. The simple fact of being there is already an action.
– Let us return to the Other Pinocchio!