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The phrase “communing with ghosts” is now in my thesis!
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In the increasingly overlapping environments of creation, curation and consumption of archives, I should like to see new, fertile readings of the relationship between archivist, artist and researcher. Where boundaries are less defined, information and practices must and should be exchanged. Just as archivists engage with the meaning and implications of their activities, as well as the needs and interests of their researchers, so the theoretical discussion of the archive should properly understand its practices and historiography."
— Sue Breakell – Perspectives: Negotiating the Archive
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In Proust’s novel “In Search of Lost Time” the episode of the madeleine tells the story of a memory being revealed without intention by the taste of a small piece of a madeleine dipped in a cup of tea. The memory that was recalled was from his childhood, and Sunday mornings with his Aunt in Combray. He says that the sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to his mind before he tasted it.
No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory – this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me it was me. … Whence did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it? … And suddenly the memory revealed itself.
It was only after the mixture of warm liquid and crumbs touched his pallet that this long dormant memory revealed itself, first slowly then all at once. This episode is a description of the function of involuntary memory, and the way in which our physical interaction with things, in this case a madeleine soaked in tea, can provoke or activate a long forgotten or submerged memory.
The filmmaker Chris Marker also has his madeleine, which he articulates through the moving image. In his film Sans Soleil (1982), which Marker presents as documentary, travelogue, and essay film, through the letters of Sandor Krasna (a pseudonym of Marker’s) read by an anonymous narrator, we learn of the travels and observations of Krasna, the globetrotting cameraman. The reading of these letters is accompanied by filmed images that relate to a varying degree to the text being read. Throughout Krasna is concerned with the formation and recall of memories, remembering and forgetting, history and time. For his part he asks, “I wonder how people remember things who don’t film, don’t photograph, don’t tape,” because for him these recording have replaced his memories, that they have become his memories. He can only remember what he has filmed, what he has photographed.
As the narrator reads Krasna’s letters, we are presented with the memories he has filmed; he starts the film by showing us an idyllic clip of three children on a road in Iceland. The narrator says:
The first image he told me about was of three children on a road in Iceland, in 1965. He said that for him it was the image of happiness and also that he had tried several times to link it to other images, but it never worked. He wrote me: one day I’ll have to put it all alone at the beginning of a film with a long piece of black leader; if they don’t see happiness in the picture, at least they’ll see the black.
The narrator continues to read Krasna’s letters, with one section leading to the next, creating or recalling associations in the memories of Krasna/Marker, leading on in at times a free-associative manner, with the connections sometimes only apparent to the owner of these memories.
Marker also attempts to illuminate or illustrate the quickly recalled and pushed aside, or discarded memory, through quick flashes of film from a place we may have not yet been introduced to. These brief flashes of film function at times as foreshadowing, as reminders of ideas or places that we are meant to consider as a tangent, and as fleeting, and involuntary memories or association that are produced by the recounting of Krasna’s letters. In a way Marker is attempting to show us how his filmed memory works, the connections he makes, and the places they take him. It is as if we can see in his mind the workings of memory, the searching of the familiar to understand the places, people, and events that he experiences – his reading and rereading of his memory.
A film that has been a persistent obsession for him is Hitchcock’s 1958 film Vertigo, one of its themes he first utilized in his 1962 film La Jetée, and he returns to it again in Sans Soleil. The narrator tells us that for him “only one film has been capable of portraying impossible memory—insane memory: Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. In the spiral of the titles he saw time covering a field ever wider as it moved away, a cyclone whose present moment contains motionless the eye.” We are told that it was a film he had seen 19 times, and like any true fanatic he made his pilgrimage to all the film’s locations. Visiting one after another in their turn, the florist Podesta Baldocchi, where James Stewart, Scotty, spies on Kim Novak, Madeleine. He tells us, “The tiles hadn’t changed.” Marker uses this story, and his reinterpretation of Vertigo as a way to move towards the impossibility of memory, and the effects of time and madness. This story of trailing, of following a woman that he believed to be possessed by another woman long since dead, “who she should not have known.” His obsession leads to infatuation and love, and when finally she throws herself from the tower at Mission San Juan Bautista, Scotty, paralyzed by the memory of his own fall, and the resulting acrophobia, is unable to climb the tower to prevent her death. This is where Marker/Krasna’s interpretation comes in. The narrator tells us that Krasna imagines Scotty as “time’s fool of love, finding it impossible to live with memory without falsifying it. Inventing a double for Madeline in another dimension of time, a zone that would belong only to him and from which he could decipher the indecipherable story that had begun at Golden Gate…” This new space created by Scotty provides us with a method for understanding the true problem of memory, that even when that memory is solidified in film that still nothing is fixed. Memories drift, shift, and are distorted, that madness or obsession or trauma will change the meaning or placement of an event in ones memories. But he also tells us that these mechanisms should be seen as protective, we are told that “madness protects, as fever does”. But this split, this new space, this return will still inevitably lead to death.
Marker experiences his own return at the moment he finds his way back to his “three children of Iceland,” “where they grafted themselves in,” as though it was a memory that recalled itself, and was presented as a new complete moment. He tells us that he picked up the whole shot again, adding in everything that he had cut inorder to tidy up. But this realization was fleeting, because immediately after he tells us that:
When five years later my friend Haroun Tazieff sent me the film he had just shot in the same place I lacked only the name to learn that nature performs its own dondo-yaki; the island’s volcano had awakened. I looked at those pictures, and it was as if the entire year ‘65 had just been covered with ashes.
For Krasna/Marker, his return was very much impossible. Not only had this place been covered in ash, and in effect annihilated and forever preserving the memory of those children, this return is made all the more impossible by the fact that it was only through the document, an experience and memory had by his friend Tazieff, that enabled this transformation. But still Marker was able to see, emerging above the cover of ash “the landmarks of the walks I took through town every day, down to the cliff where I had met the children.” But these memories have been forever changed by the eruption, by the memories recorded and then transcribed to Marker.
With Proust too there is a kind of impossibility. In 2005 the journalist Edmund Levin attempted to recreate the experience, at least physically, that was described by the narrator of “In Search of Lost Time.” He discovers that Proust’s madeleine likely could not have crumbled in the manner described. When he broke off a piece of the cake, placed it in a cup of tea, he waited for it to begin to disintegrate, to become crumbs in his spoon as Proust had written. It didn’t happen. The cake remained whole, with only a small number of crumbs assembling at the bottom of the cup. Naturally Levin finds Proust’s involuntarily recalled memory, or at least its trigger, inaccessible.
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I feel that there is much to be said for the Celtic belief that the souls of those whom we have lost are held captive in some inferior being, in an animal, in a plant, in some inanimate object, and so effectively lost to us until the day (which to many never comes) when we happen to pass by the tree or to obtain possession of the object which forms their prison. Then they start and tremble, they call us by our name, and as soon as we have recognised their voice the spell is broken. We have delivered them: they have overcome death and return to share our life.
And so it is with our own past. It is a labour in vain to attempt to recapture it: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) which we do not suspect. And as for that object, it depends on chance whether we come upon it or not before we ourselves must die.
Many years had elapsed during which nothing of Combray, save what was comprised in the theatre and the drama of my going to bed there, had any existence for me, when one day in winter, as I came home, my mother, seeing that I was cold, offered me some tea, a thing I did not ordinarily take. I declined at first, and then, for no particular reason, changed my mind. She sent out for one of those short, plump little cakes called ‘petites madeleines,’ which look as though they had been moulded in the fluted scallop of a pilgrim’s shell. And soon, mechanically, weary after a dull day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate, a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory—this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was myself. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I was conscious that it was connected with the taste of tea and cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savours, could not, indeed, be of the same nature as theirs. Whence did it come? What did it signify? How could I seize upon and define it?
I drink a second mouthful, in which I find nothing more than in the first, a third, which gives me rather less than the second. It is time to stop; the potion is losing its magic. It is plain that the object of my quest, the truth, lies not in the cup but in myself. The tea has called up in me, but does not itself understand, and can only repeat indefinitely with a gradual loss of strength, the same testimony; which I, too, cannot interpret, though I hope at least to be able to call upon the tea for it again and to find it there presently, intact and at my disposal, for my final enlightenment. I put down my cup and examine my own mind. It is for it to discover the truth. But how? What an abyss of uncertainty whenever the mind feels that some part of it has strayed beyond its own borders; when it, the seeker, is at once the dark region through which it must go seeking, where all its equipment will avail it nothing. Seek? More than that: create. It is face to face with something which does not so far exist, to which it alone can give reality and substance, which it alone can bring into the light of day.
And I begin again to ask myself what it could have been, this unremembered state which brought with it no logical proof of its existence, but only the sense that it was a happy, that it was a real state in whose presence other states of consciousness melted and vanished. I decide to attempt to make it reappear. I retrace my thoughts to the moment at which I drank the first spoonful of tea. I find again the same state, illumined by no fresh light. I compel my mind to make one further effort, to follow and recapture once again the fleeting sensation. And that nothing may interrupt it in its course I shut out every obstacle, every extraneous idea, I stop my ears and inhibit all attention to the sounds which come from the next room. And then, feeling that my mind is growing fatigued without having any success to report, I compel it for a change to enjoy that distraction which I have just denied it, to think of other things, to rest and refresh itself before the supreme attempt. And then for the second time I clear an empty space in front of it. I place in position before my mind’s eye the still recent taste of that first mouthful, and I feel something start within me, something that leaves its resting-place and attempts to rise, something that has been embedded like an anchor at a great depth; I do not know yet what it is, but I can feel it mounting slowly; I can measure the resistance, I can hear the echo of great spaces traversed.
Undoubtedly what is thus palpitating in the depths of my being must be the image, the visual memory which, being linked to that taste, has tried to follow it into my conscious mind. But its struggles are too far off, too much confused; scarcely can I perceive the colourless reflection in which are blended the uncapturable whirling medley of radiant hues, and I cannot distinguish its form, cannot invite it, as the one possible interpreter, to translate to me the evidence of its contemporary, its inseparable paramour, the taste of cake soaked in tea; cannot ask it to inform me what special circumstance is in question, of what period in my past life.
Will it ultimately reach the clear surface of my consciousness, this memory, this old, dead moment which the magnetism of an identical moment has travelled so far to importune, to disturb, to raise up out of the very depths of my being? I cannot tell. Now that I feel nothing, it has stopped, has perhaps gone down again into its darkness, from which who can say whether it will ever rise? Ten times over I must essay the task, must lean down over the abyss. And each time the natural laziness which deters us from every difficult enterprise, every work of importance, has urged me to leave the thing alone, to drink my tea and to think merely of the worries of to-day and of my hopes for to-morrow, which let themselves be pondered over without effort or distress of mind.
And suddenly the memory returns. The taste was that of the little crumb of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before church-time), when I went to say good day to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of real or of lime-flower tea. The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it; perhaps because I had so often seen such things in the interval, without tasting them, on the trays in pastry-cooks’ windows, that their image had dissociated itself from those Combray days to take its place among others more recent; perhaps because of those memories, so long abandoned and put out of mind, nothing now survived, everything was scattered; the forms of things, including that of the little scallop-shell of pastry, so richly sensual under its severe, religious folds, were either obliterated or had been so long dormant as to have lost the power of expansion which would have allowed them to resume their place in my consciousness. But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, still, alone, more fragile, but with more vitality, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.
And once I had recognized the taste of the crumb of madeleine soaked in her decoction of lime-flowers which my aunt used to give me (although I did not yet know and must long postpone the discovery of why this memory made me so happy) immediately the old grey house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like the scenery of a theatre to attach itself to the little pavilion, opening on to the garden, which had been built out behind it for my parents (the isolated panel which until that moment had been all that I could see); and with the house the town, from morning to night and in all weathers, the Square where I was sent before luncheon, the streets along which I used to run errands, the country roads we took when it was fine. And just as the Japanese amuse themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it little crumbs of paper which until then are without character or form, but, the moment they become wet, stretch themselves and bend, take on colour and distinctive shape, become flowers or houses or people, permanent and recognisable, so in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann’s park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and of its surroundings, taking their proper shapes and growing solid, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, all from my cup of tea.
"— Excerpt from “Remembrance of Things Past”
