In the Kitchen of Memory

Jawa, 1930

“The past is never dead. It's not even past.”

William Faulkner wrote beautifully in his “Requiem for a Nun”.

The time. Each of us struggles, in his own way, against this python that wraps itself around our bodies.

Each in his own way. Who to forget and who to remember.

Each of us bears a wound in the abyss of his soul that he would like to vanish from his skin and which instead tattoos every inch of his heart to prevent oblivion from taking what is dear to us.

I, like everyone, have poison and honey.

But I am completely captivated by time and its flow, perhaps because until today, I cannot do without childhood memories.

It's like a part of me was forever imprisoned in those distant years, with its nightmares and emotions.

Looking in the mirror at my face with the first wrinkles and the white that colors me, I can still glimpse myself of the days gone by, of childhood, and adolescence. They overlap.

Maybe mine is an unsuccessful existence, blocked in it becoming as if a boulder had alighted on the tip of the tail of the snake that I am.

And so I go back to my old photographs.

Even if it's not mine; but other places and past centuries.

I superimpose them on the ones I shoot, I listen to their dialogues.

They speak to me.

As if even those faces, those unknown people, in their sepia tones and faded black and white, were imprisoned like me.

In a non-place.

Hibernate from that magical act that is Photography, which is the memory of what no longer exists.

And a deep nostalgia assails me.

What a splendid word that is nostalgia – perhaps one of the most beautiful.

From νόστος (nostos), the return and άλγος (algos), the pain: that is, literally the pain of the return (or rather the pain of not being able to go back in time and/or space).

Which then, although derived from the Greek, like many scientific terms, was unknown to the Greek world. It was only in the seventeenth century that this term entered the European vocabulary, thanks to an Alsatian medical student of the University of Basel, Johannes Hofer, who, noting the suffering of Swiss mercenaries in the service of the French King Louis XIV, forced to staying away from the mountains and valleys of their homeland for a long time, he dedicated a thesis to this phenomenon, published in Basel in 1688 with the title “Medical dissertation on nostalgia”. With this newly coined Greek term, in fact, Hofer translates into scientific language the French expression “mal du pays” and the German term “Heimweh” (literally, a pain for the house), still used today in their respective languages.

The genealogies of words are often bizarre.

I look at these two old women, both Indonesian.

With the identical batik tied at the waist and the shirt also in floral batik, both busy in their poor kitchen, in a village; the wicker baskets, the large tampi (or tampah, nyiru) of woven bamboo to sift the rice, the copper pans hung on the wall.

1930 one and 2016 the other. Almost a century apart.

Yet both of them live in that non-existent place called nostalgia.

And I with them.

 

Photographs are like tattoos to me.

Written with memory ink on the skin of our souls.

If you look at those ancient photographs for a long time, they are like images on the surface of the water that invites us, deceptively, to dive to rejoin them. But knowing that it will always be impossible, and of the word nostalgia, we will feel more pain than return.

After all, Gibran wrote it in one of his most beautiful aphorisms.

"I am for ever walking upon these shores,
betwixt the sand and the foam.
The high tide will erase my foot-prints,
and the wind will blow away the foam.
But the sea and the shore will remain
for ever."

Yes for ever.

Like those two grannies trapped in their kitchen, in their usual acts, in their threadbare clothes. Forever.

They are the sea and the beach.

We will pass. We will forget and we will be forgotten.

Or we will live in the tattoos of someone's memories.

But, of course, those past times will never return.

I will continue to look with greed and pain at all the ancient photographs of people and places that I don't know. Living their lives. Trying to force me into their lives to extend mine back in time.

 

Who knows if there will ever be anyone able to understand how much I love those old photographs.

The enormous importance they have to me. For my incomplete life.

A construction, or narration as they like to say so much today, which moves backward.

And if someone still asks me why, why this sticky linkage with those images of the past, I will answer with the verses of Iliya Dahir Abu Madi, Lebanese poet of the early twentieth century.

“Take your attention away from the thorns
and turn it to the flowers of the garden,
and forget about scorpions
when you look at the stars.”
(Iliya Dahir Abu Madi, from “The Love”)
  

Kampung Pasirdoton, Cidahu. Sukabumi, Indonesia, 2016

Italian version