With the Cadavre Exquis we had at our disposal an infallible means of sending the mind’s critical mechanism away on vacation and fully releasing its metaphorical potentialities.

Memory - the faculty by which the mind stores and remembers information.

Souvenir

Subvenio, Latin (lat)

support, assist, come to the aid of, rescue

In this sense, the brain contributes to the recall of the useful recollection, but still more to the provisional banishment of all the others.

Memory is not like a private chamber within the individual consciousness but is more of a process of reconstruction: an activity of localization and configuration.

In other words, it is from the present that comes the appeal to which memory responds, and it is from the sensori-motor elements of present action that a memory borrows the warmth which gives it life.

I carried to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had let soften a piece of Madeleine. But at the very instant when the mouthful of tea mixed with cake-crumbs touched my palate, I quivered, attentive to the extraordinary thing that was happening in me.

I will have spent my life trying to understand the function of remembering, which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather its lining. We do not remember, we rewrite memory much as history is rewritten.

They all journeyed to the Plain of Oblivion, there they camped at eventide by the River of Forgetfulness, whose waters no vessel can contain. They were all required to drink a measure of the water and each one as he drank forgot all things. And after they had fallen asleep, they were suddenly wafted thence, one this way, one that, upward to their birth like shooting stars.

Memory is contrasted not with forgetting but with the forgetting of forgetting. Memory is coextensive with forgetting.

We seem at times overwhelmed by the oceanic feeling of a limitless archive, of which the city is the most physical example and the "memory" of our computers is the most ethereal yet the most trusted, and at others afflicted by a fear that the material traces of the past might be swept away, taking memory with them.

When the memory of the primitive races began to be surcharged, when the load of tradition carried about by the human family grew so heavy and disordered that the word, naked and fleeting, ran danger of being lost by the way, they transcribed it on the ground by the most visible, the most lasting, and at the same time most natural means. They enclosed each tradition in a monument.

Each time humans create an instrument after their own idea, the instrument in turn and in its own way reshapes the mentality of its creator.

Passaic seems full of « holes » compared to New York City, which seems tightly packed and solid, and those holes in a sense are the monumental vacancies that define, without trying, the memory traces of an abandoned set of futures.

I suspect, nevertheless, that he was not very capable of thought. To think is to forget a difference, to generalize, to abstract. In the overly replete world of Funes there were nothing but details, almost contiguous details.

Memories are crafted by oblivion as the outline of the shore are created by the sea.

Memories are like plants: there are those that need to be quickly eliminated in order to help the others burgeon, transform, flower.

An assemblage is a multiplicity which is made up of many heterogeneous terms and which establishes liaisons, relations between them across ages, sexes and reigns-different natures. Thus, the assemblage’s only unity is that of co-functioning; it is a symbiosis, a “sympathy”.

The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past.

Any elements, no matter where they are taken from, can be used to make new combinations. The discovery of modern poetry regarding the analo- gical structure of images demonstrates that when two obejcts are brought together, no matter how far apart their original context may be, a relation is always formed.

I think the fragment is the only possible moment and the only possible place to understand.

By what then are montage and its embryo -the frame- characterized? By collisions. By the conflict of two fragments placed side by side. By conflict. By collision.