I HEAR IT IN THE DEEP HEART'S CORE

Remembering is like constructing and then traveling again through a space. We are already talking about architecture. Memories are built as a city is built.

“What interested me was memory itself, the architectures memory constructs, the interpretive act of remembering. There is a passage in a poem by Alfred Corn which says it beautifully:

Solitude, descending the valley in calm, tell me to what wild wood, to what sea does forgetting go

Where have the lost fragments gone? As I lie wakeful in bed what I see is a long corridor of closed doors.

“Writing down your thoughts is both necessary and harmful. It leads to eccentricity, narcissism, preserves what should be let go. On the other hand, these notes intensify the inner life, which, left unexpressed, slips through your fingers. If only I could find a better kind of journal, humbler, one that would preserve the same thoughts, the same flesh of life, which is worth saving. Moreover the writer invents himself [or herself] as a character in this form. He shapes himself from the shards of the everyday, from the truth of that daily life. Which is also a truth not to be scorned.”

One thing remained attainable, close and unlost amidst all the losses: language.

The Italians have a word for the store of poems you have in your head: a gazofilacio […] in its original language it actually means a treasure chamber of the mind. The poems I remember are the milestones marking the journey of my life. And unlike paintings, sculptures or passages of great music, they do not outstrip the scope of memory, but are the actual thing, incarnate.