Let me tell you a story about other stories.
About the stories we tell ourselves, and how by telling them they become real. Our world is made of stories, we are made of stories, and yet we hardly notice them.
They seem transparent.
What differentiates us from other animals is that our language is creative and not merely descriptive. Our communication has the role of assigning meaning to the world. We create things by agreeing they exist.
We might know some facts, but facts alone are not enough to our minds.
We like to find (or create?) relationships between facts, to jump into conclusions.
We like to find (or create?) relationships between facts, to jump into conclusions.
So many things are made up. Ideologies, identities, histories. Around every core of truth there are virtually infinite layers of meaning that we have weaved.
Different narratives come to form one huge network of meaning. People tell stories about themselves, societies tell stories about their past and the things that hold them together. Personal and collective stories constantly interact, altering one another.
Our memory is based upon narrations of the past which explain our present, and build expectations for the future. The past, as we perceive it, is not fixed. It is made out of stories about what happened that we tell over and over again. And what actually happened, though still important, lacks weight.
What drives us forward is our idea of the past, making no difference whether this is objective or not. And narrations change as our lives unfold. An event from childhood is seen differently when remembered in adulthood.
Yet we strive for permanence in this ever-changing world, so we create things to keep our memories for us.
A photograph that holds the image of a dear person,
a few words on a gravestone to describe a life,
monuments of people or events considered to be important,
heirlooms passed down from our ancestors,
museums to bring order to a chaotic past,
ancient findings in modern cities.
Objects are permanent, unlike our thoughts, though still susceptible to the passage of time.
We have the objects, what about the stories?
We have the objects, what about the stories?
Some Roman emperor left this as a sign of his reign in the region. For the locals it became "the Stone" and a different story was told about its origins.
After centuries had passed and the emperor was forgotten, the locals believed that it was made for Alexander the Great. Mystical properties were assigned to it. Generations of women scratched its surface as they thought that drinking from the raspings would help them get pregnant. It was given a new identity.
After centuries had passed and the emperor was forgotten, the locals believed that it was made for Alexander the Great. Mystical properties were assigned to it. Generations of women scratched its surface as they thought that drinking from the raspings would help them get pregnant. It was given a new identity.
Stories are fluid. They take new shapes, and when they come to a dead end they form new paths, the way water corrodes the earth. Stories change with time and thus assign new meaning to the world around us.
A skull belonging to the species Homo Heidelbergensis, ancestor of the Neanderthals.
Who was this person before becoming an exhibit? Well, we'll never know, that much is obvious. It is a skull and not a person, but not because of his death, rather because the story of his life that would make us see him as a person is lost.
Now this specimen has a new function as it contributes to the narrative of a museum, of a country, and of humanity that wants desperately to know its origins.
The more we know about someone's life, the more we see him as a person and less as a symbol or a thing.
Religious icons are presented in a non religious setting. They are admired as pieces of history or art, but people no longer pray before them, as they are not lying in an environment in which such an act is expected.
We are fascinated by the human form. We keep reproducing it in materials like stone or paper, from ancient times to digital age. There is always some tenderness in the depictions used to memorialise people.
We want to remember the appearance of people, as if by forgetting it they would be truly gone.
And what about the depiction of people in these little shrines in our homes. They construct an image, not always true, and generally somewhat simplified, of the family life. The photos mark the close circle of relatives, alive or deceased, maybe in some important moments of their lives.
It is a statement: this is us, these are our stories and our achievements. We are not alone. We belong.
In public spaces, signs of the past can be seen everywhere, yet usually they pass unnoticed. They become part of the environment, thus neutral.
How many people have actually looked at this iron face?
Or payed attention to old inscriptions left by the side of the road, and abandoned churches, and memorials for the dead?
Or payed attention to old inscriptions left by the side of the road, and abandoned churches, and memorials for the dead?
All remnants of some other era.
What we have to keep in mind is that memory is linked to forgetfulness. Memory is but an echo, a distortion of an event. Some elements fade, while others are being emphasised.
We fear forgetfulness, we fear that what we perceive as important won’t have the same value in the future or will be lost. We fear to confront what we already know – that something new and unknown will come.
But loss has its own importance, as it opens up space for the change to come.
All around us, there exist pieces of the past, either consciously preserved or left out of indifference. In any case, the past is there telling us stories about who we were and who we are. We see the memorabilia, we think we know a thing or two about them, but everything is up to interpretation.
There is beauty and fluidity in memory. Permanence is an illusion, decay is the law. The past is everywhere, and not just in abstract terms.
We only have to look.
