tooknap press

RECOLLECTION: 

happy and/or harrowing remembrance of an object, a gesture, a scene 
tied to the loved one and marked by the intrusion of the imperfect tense 
into the grammar of the lover's discourse.  

1.

"We are having a magnificent summer and I am often in Lotte's orchard, perched in the trees, a long pole in hand to strip the pears from their branches.  She, down below, catches them as I send them to her." 

Werther, narrates, speaks in the present tense, but his tableau is already doing the work of memory: the imperfect murmurs in a low voice behind this present.  One day, I will remember this scene, I will lose myself in the past.  The lovers' scene, just as in the first ravishing, is created only by aftershocks: it is anamnesis, found only in insignificant, hardly dramatic traits, as if I remembered only time and time itself, a perfume without a medium, a grain of memory, a simple fragrance; something like pure expenditure, the kind that the Japanese haiku alone knows how to express, without recuperating it in any future.  

(We used to have, to catch the figs in high branches in B.'s garden, a long pole made of bamboo and a tin funnel stamped with florets that was attached to it.  This childhood memory functions like an amorous one.)

2. 

"The stars were shining."  Never again will this happiness return as such.  Anamnesis fills me up and tears me apart. 

The imperfect is the tense of fascination: it has the air of being alive, and yet never moves: imperfect presence, imperfect death; neither forgetting nor resurrection, simply the exhausting lure of memory.  From the origin, eager to play a role, scenes position themselves in memory: often, I sense this, predict it, at the very moment in which they take shape. -- This theatre of time is the very opposite of the search for lost time; for I remember pathetically, punctually, and not philosophically, discursively; I remember in order to feel happy or unhappy -- not in order to understand.  I do not write, I do not lock myself away to write the enormous novel of time regained.  

           {A Lover's Discourse}