Archipel: un blog de travail et de recherche

Don Mckay publie de magnifiques livres qui oscillent entre la poésie, la philosophie et le récit.  Je cite ici un extrait de «Approaching the clearing», qui fait partie du livre Desactivated west 100.

«That is how we experience a clearing when walking through the forest, as a pool of light where the trees relent, a place that combines seclusion with openness.  As we approach, we tend to slow down and shut up, partly because of a possible deer or fox, and partly out of a respect for the presence which always seems to gather in a clearing. Each has its own character, its own tone.  I suspect that sense of presence is the true ancestor of our notion of place, before abritrary naming and the grid » (mon emphase).

Mckay, Don. Desactivated West 100. Kentville: Gaspereau press, 2005. Page 98.

C’est la première fois que je lis quelque chose d’aussi éclairant sur la mémoire et l’histoire.  Bon, je n’ai pas lu beaucoup sur le sujet, vous me direz, mais je trouve tout de même que la distinction qu’il fait entre les deux termes est très interessante.  En voici un extrait.

Memory is life, borne by living societies founded in its name.  It remains in permanent evolution, open to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting, unconscious of its successive deformations, vulnerable to manipulation and appropriation, susceptible to being long dormant and periodically revived.  History, on the other hand, is the reconstruction, always problematic and incomplete, of what is no longer.  Memory is a perpetually actual phenomenon, a bond tying us to the eternal present; history is a representation of the past.  [...] Memory takes root in the concrete, in spaces, gestures, images, and objects; history binds itself strictly to temporal continuities, to progressions and to relations between things.

Nora, Pierre. «Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire». Representations 26, Spring (1989): 7-25. Page 8.