I pass, like night, from land to land
Despite strong currents and tumultuous displacements, the running water tells the inevitable flow that also brings with it trunks, branches and waste that accumulate and strands. The perilous water wants to break the resistance of the debris, but they sediment surviving destruction and transformation.
The branch in the video, stranded at that fixed point in a precarious equilibrium, performs an act that in itself has defense and attack, a voluntary action to persist, to attempt to maintain its hold.
Memory, in the same way, is resistance, it opposes uncertainty, forgetfulness, dispersion, destruction. Attempting to maintain and preserve memory, to tell and communicate it, is to build and stratify presences.
The urgency and necessity of the story is what moves the Ancient Mariner of Coleridge to entertain one of the three guests he has met, who must listen to his story.
The next day the boy will wake up sadder and wiser.
(…)
Since then, at an uncertain hour,
That agony returns:
And till my ghastly tale is told,
This heart within me burns.
I pass, like night, from land to land;
I have strange power of speech;
That moment that his face I see,
I know the man that hear me:
To him my tale I teach.
(…)”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Video Hd 1920×540, 01’43’’
2019
thanks to Umberto Costamagna