One would like very much to imagine the space of one`s memory as being a deep pool of water. The surface of the water would symbolise the present, the intersecting line between the airwaves of the future and the liquid glass of the past. The younger and more recent the experiences, the closer they are to the surface – their images present themselves as being bright and clearly sketched. The longer the length of time, the deeper they sink. They appear increasingly dark, hazy and contorted with the passage of time. At some point they become blurred shadows, a distant idea or a hunch, which can barely be distinguished from their surroundings – then, however, some of them also sparkle seductively. In this imagination our memory is the light that reflects the depths through the complex lenses of the water – at times target-oriented, illuminating one thing in particular, at other times being refracted towards another. The floor-bed of the water would mark, as it were, the Limes of all memory, the border of nothingness, or at least of an area that is out of reach of our consciousness.
Such an imagination of our memory is beautiful and convincing – but false, naturally. Because, in fact, our memory is an opaque soup in which things are swimming across and against one and another. These things can rise to the surface as suddenly as they can sink abruptly to the bottom. They don’t simply cross our mind, instead they hit against our feet, make us sweat, rip our genitalia, tickle our nose, or lie ice-cold in our stomach. Naturally, the waters of memory are turgid because the floor-bed is being constantly churned, because the ground wants to perpetually interfere. Question is, what do we do with this knowledge?
The Rio de la Plata, too, is something that is non-transparent, a water-body that seems as though it is in the process of turning into land. We are familiar with ponds, lakes and rivers being full of sludge, more often in the aftermath of a heavy downpour. The Rio de la Plata is however always brown like molten earth, even when there has been no rain for a long spell. Moreover, it is so wide that we cannot make out the opposite bank, and so deep that even mighty ships can sail in it. This river therefore appears to our eye and to our mind’s eye more like an ocean. And, as an ocean it leads us to imagine that the floor-bed of the world could all of a sudden be churned so violently that the sea would lose its transparency and thicken into a vast dense soup in which the continents float around like croutons.
First Publication: 23-4-2013
Modifications: 28-6-2013