It’s true that when I thought of you, I thought forgetting had drawn back before writing – I carried a torch into the darkness and observed the expanses of my history, like the beasts from ancient cave paintings. It came to me almost all at once – you, and the world I encountered with you, through you. Then I thought: I haven’t changed, my world’s the same – I relive the same over and again; is this the truth I’ve been made to confront, as if the beast on the wall, splendid and terrifying, embodying by itself the forward-movement of an animal, its soul, was only another version of the beast I was? I saw myself; I remembered myself – confirmed was the past that wouldn’t cease to arrive.
But then, another experience, this time of the darkness around the beast and from which it emerged. How was it the shining ochre of the beast gave darkness itself more depth, more presence? The night itself became dense; darkness was more heavy and more strange – without form, without name, it was of oblivion that the beast was made to speak. So forgetting, which is not merely the absence of memory. So forgetting which is what redoubles itself in writing, for it is memory that is made to draw back, not the opposite – memory that sets off forgetting, in which forgetting presses forward with its own force.
I remember you, but I also forget with you. That is, as it came to me, a world – our world, the world to which you introduced me and that we lived together – brought with it what was not yet a world and would never be: the return, from the past, of that for which forgetting is only one name. Oblivion: it is not that the soul comes back to itself in successive rebirths, but the opposite: what is lost over and again is the soul; what cannot lift itself from the flesh is the soul; what dies there repeatedly, over and again is again the soul.
The soul: locus of forgetting-in-memory. It is with the soul that I remember you and that I forget with your memory. Come close to me, bring it to me, let it return: death must be reborn in life, forgetting must give birth to itself in memory. That is how I remember, and it is how remembering draws back before forgetting. The beast is coming forward, but now it is made of darkness and not light. The beast: forgetting, the forgetting that is memory.
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