What the City Leaves Within Us // part of The Flow: a study on the stream of consciousness
Memory is never a fixed image. It never exists alone: it calls forth another image, another place, another moment. It operates like a force — returning, shifting, transforming.
What we call “remembering” is not direct access to the past, but a probabilistic reconstruction, a reconfiguration of fragments that have survived.
Thus, a place to which we have returned a thousand times no longer exists as a single point in space.
It becomes a node within an invisible geometry of affects.
The past resurfaces not because it has been preserved intact, but because it finds, in the present, a resonance that reactivates it.
A perpetual movement between what was, what might have been, and what continues to act.
It is not the fidelity of memory that matters, but the relations between these fragments that continue to live within us.
Benjamin Bardou
The Flow
