The Ball of Memory

“The Greek word for “return” is nostos.
Algos means “suffering.”
So, nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.”
(Milan Kundera)

Breakdancers. Rome – August 2011

That memory and the conception of the past is not something simple to define is not new.

That time flows in a non-linear way and with an accumulable value, I certainly do not invent it.

Marcel Proust wrote about this a novel of thousands of pages, and Henri Bergson described this enigma with a metaphor that has become famous in the world of philosophy.

According to Bergson, time is not unique, but there are two kinds of times: the time of science and the time of life. 

The first is made up of moments that are only quantitatively different; this time is a sum of seconds and is also reversible as an experiment can be repeated and observed an indefinite number of times. 

The time of life, that of the psyche, on the other hand, consists of moments that are qualitatively different from each other. The moments lived in this time are unrepeatable.

“For a conscious being, to exist means to change, to change means to mature, to mature means to create oneself indefinitely.”

The spatialized time of physics is imagined as a string of pearls, all equal and distinct from each other, while the image of time as duration is a ball of thread. This ball changes continuously and grows on itself.

 

We never remember following a path of pearls in a row one after the other, all the same, but in an emotional way, without a trend established by time but by our emotions, like a ball that wraps. 

An image from ten years ago can have a stronger character and value than what happened to me three years ago. 

Memory is fascinating. Obviously, there is a reason why I am writing about this. And not for Bergson, peace be upon his soul.

But it is always a reflection born from some photographs. And from the glances. Another strange thing is the glance of the people.

I happened to pull out some old photographs, dating back to 2010/11. Having to participate in a photographic exhibition on breakdance I opened the archives, finding some photographs taken in those years.

Every time we look at our photographs, something always happens inside of us. Because they are the visible traces of our changes.

I have already written about the emotion that I tried to find my first photographs, of the Philippines or of the first portraits of the Bangladeshi community. These fell in the same period, in which I would never have imagined myself as now.

Still halfway between the old job and the crazy urge to leave everything and embrace only the path of photography. I was for two days in the company of these breakdancers from all over the world, America, Morocco, Poland, France...

Following and documenting the exercises of the day before in the school gym and the contest the day after. I didn't know them and they didn't know me.

However, in these cases, spending hours and hours together breaks down any distance. I am not saying that we become friends, because it is an important word, but we create invisible and indefinite bonds.

Everyone poses in front of my lens in a different way, according to their style and character.

Seeing those photographs and portraits I can't remember perfectly, not like something that happened to me two years ago in Malaysia or last year in Bangladesh.

Even going back five years, there are moments that I remember with more intensity and detail.

But, but...

Reviewing their gaze on me makes time stop being a string of pearls, but it becomes a lost thread in the intricate ball of my existence. 

Their eyes remind me, turning my attention to who I was, how much pleasure I felt in sweating and getting tired with them.

It is such a strong sense of intimacy that it seems to feel it again, right now, with the same intensity. Each of us has experienced what I mean.

It is not what happened a month ago that is more powerful than what happened ten or twenty years ago.

A caress from one's mother at the age of ten after falling and injured in the knee can have a clear and very deep memory more than an important award we received a week ago.

 

Time is a ball of yarn where the thread has been lost inside. We are the ones who make sense of that thread.

And two eyes that look at us, smiling, from a photograph, can often pull out the end of that thread, deliver it to our fingers.

To remind us who we were. And who we have become.

 

Italian version