"Memory really matters...only if it binds together the imprint of the past and the project of the future, if it enables us to act without forgetting what we wanted to do, to become without ceasing to be, and to be without ceasing to become."
Last time I saw my Dad was two years and a half ago. It was winter, and it was winter in my heart as well.
I could not see how to get off that lost and I did not know where I wanted to go and I had forgotten where I came from.
It was a good encounter, he is a poetic scientific mind, or at least that is how I see it; and talking to him , who is in such a different field of knowledge, I find, we have to go to basic to create some form of understanding , that is the way we connect.
Many things had happened… my grand mother, his mother, had died, and I was not there. She was the glue, the reason of my household to get together and celebrate. She was a ‘raw self’, honest,peaceful and beloved by us all.
When my Dad came to visit, he tried to bring me a photograph of the funeral, so I could partake of the last good bye. But he said the photograph, mysteriously got deleted from the camera but he was not that sorry because he said it did not capture how beautiful and peaceful she looked.
Many of my friends have found this idea strange and even creepy, but I can only see love.
Some how we started talking about the power of emotions to affect the perception of things, I thought the perception of peace, present or not, was coming from his heart.The picture was just the fact, his description was the full register of the memory of the event past.
I told him that Contemporary Art was like that, like the Rorschach inkblot test-to put it in medical terms-We 'project' ourselves into the object of art, and if it reaches us, we establish a dialogue with it, we connect, and we find meaning.
“There is an important difference between getting an ordinary object accepted as a work of art and having a work of art taken as an ordinary object.
The latter is simply a mistake, whereas the former entails a philosophical revolution in the very meaning of Art.”
When he left, I still did not know where I was going but I knew who I was and where I came from.
No comments:
Post a Comment