“Memory believes before knowing remembers. It believes longer than recollection recalls, longer even than knowing questions itself.”
William Faulkner, Light in August
Where life reveals itself as an uninterrupted succession of jolts, memories and lies which, happily wedding one another and endlessly deceiving and mistaking one another… often find themselves again in new beginnings…
Perhaps we should begin by being wary of this word succession… and even more so of everything added to it… which seems to promise an order where perhaps it signifies nothing more than the far more modest and far more extraordinary fact that something comes after something else, without anything assuring us that this after is its consequence, its fulfilment, its punishment, or even its legitimate descendant… For life, if it possesses continuity, hardly seems to have been given along with it the obligation to provide us with the plan, and we move through that continuity like someone who, having found on a beach a few planks, a rope, a scrap of sail and, why not, the worn wooden head of a decapitated puppet, would conclude with admirable confidence that he now holds in his hands the plans of a ship… or of some down-to-earth story that would carry us safely into port…
That someone, far from being just anyone, nevertheless holds something. And that is already a great deal. For the jolt is not an interruption of life… it may be its most elementary way of continuing. The heart itself, that little theologian, clothed entirely in muscle and nerves, which never asks our opinion, knows no other way of living than to begin again what it has just completed. It contracts, relaxes, fills itself, for better or worse, with what it must immediately expel, and this fidelity to inconstancy is provisionally enough to keep us among the living. We would like living to mean holding on. Our body, with an insolence old enough to be forgiven, teaches us that holding on often consists in letting go and taking hold again.
The sea proceeds no differently.
What we call its calm is merely the insufficiency of our gaze. Beneath that surface which we declare motionless because it has had the courtesy not to knock us over, masses of water glide, plunge, rise again, meet, skirt around one another; differences of temperature and density slowly displace immensities without any spectacle necessarily announcing this to the person watching from the shore. One body of water carries another, which penetrates it without exactly losing itself within it, while a third, colder or saltier, descends beneath them like a memory too heavy to have found peace, but which has found its depth.
Perhaps our memories move in the same way.
We readily speak of memory as a place where something has been preserved. What strange faith we place in storehouses! Memory does not warehouse the past: it puts it back into circulation. Every memory that rises again passes through present waters, receives from them their temperature, their light, their currents, and what returns is already no longer what descended. It has taken on foreign salts, skirted depths whose existence we did not know, encountered other memories with which, in that darkness where our consciousness descends only episodically and always very poorly equipped, it has contracted dubious alliances.
This is where the lie enters the stage.
It enters, moreover, without knocking, having long possessed the keys to the house.
But we should do it this justice: it is not always the enemy of truth. It even happens that truth, that stern grand lady whom we imagine dressed in white and walking in a straight line, is obliged, in order to cross our existence, to borrow the far more comfortable garments of the lie. We tell ourselves what happened to us; as soon as we tell it, we choose, displace, bring things together, forget, perhaps invent a causality where there had been only an encounter, then we remember our story and soon the story itself becomes an event in our past.
Thus the lie does not necessarily come after memory in order to corrupt it.
They are born almost together.
They are of the same water.
And their marriage, like all happy marriages, perhaps rests upon a misunderstanding deep enough to last.
Memory says to the lie: I recognise you.
The lie replies: So do I.
And neither knows exactly whom it has just married.
That is why they can marry happily.
Happiness, here, does not mean that they speak the truth; it means that they produce. From their union are born those strange creatures we call our childhood, our history, our loyalties, our wounds, our remorse, sometimes even our convictions, and whose features, twenty or fifty years later, we discover with astonishment resemble neither entirely the father nor entirely the mother.
But there is more: they endlessly deceive and mistake one another.
And the verb is admirably treacherous, since se tromper means both to make a mistake and to deceive the other—or oneself—so that memory and falsehood live in a reciprocal infidelity which is precisely what prevents them from becoming fixed. Memory betrays the lie it had adopted; the lie sometimes corrects, unknowingly, a memory that has grown too certain of itself; something we had held to be certain cracks open, something we had declared false begins to breathe again, and there, in the midst of this small domestic disaster, an opening appears.
The worst is not always certain.
Nor is the best, which is less consoling but philosophically cleaner.
For nothing guarantees that this opening is a deliverance. It is merely a possibility of movement, and that alone already distinguishes it from the grave, although the grave itself, if for a moment we consent to look at it with the eyes of matter rather than those of the body's owner, is a remarkably busy place where nothing seems willing for long to respect the immobility we attribute to the dead.
Everything transforms because nothing knows perfectly how to remain what it is.
Fire teaches us this with greater brutality.
We watch it rise and say: the fire rises. But what rises with it is more than flame. Heated air becomes ascent, carrying vapour, particles, smoke, and if the fire is vast enough, violent enough, obstinate enough in its earthly labour, it creates above itself the atmospheric conditions for another power: convection organises itself, the cloud is born from the fire, grows from what feeds it, until it sometimes becomes a pyrocumulonimbus, a meteorological architecture engendered by destruction, a monstrous column in which rising currents summon their counter-currents, where water born of heat can return to the earth, where lightning can be born from the fire and sometimes rekindle elsewhere that from which it was born.
There is a genealogy no family would wish to have engraved as a family tree above the mantelpiece.
Fire engenders the cloud.
The cloud engenders lightning.
Lightning engenders fire.
And anyone who asked which of the three began would doubtless be asking a reasonable question to which the world, having never promised to be reasonable in quite the same terms as ourselves, might answer simply by beginning to burn again.
There is something in this circulation that bears a terrible resemblance to our inner life.
Aucun commentaire:
Enregistrer un commentaire