THE EDGE OF MEMORY

We see, then, that in this final synthesis of time, the present and future are in turn no more than dimensions of the future: the past as condition, the present as agent. The first synthesis, that of habit, constituted time as a living present by means of a passive foundation on which past and future depended. The second synthesis, that of memory, constituted time as a pure past, from the point of view of a ground which causes the passing of one present and the arrival of another. In the third synthesis, however, the present is no more than an actor, an author, an agent destined to be effaced; while the past is no more than a condition operating by default. The synthesis of time here constitutes a future which affirms at once both the unconditioned character of the product in relation to the conditions of its production, and the independence of the work in relation to its author or actor. In all three syntheses, present, past and future are revealed as Repetition, but in very different modes. The present is the repeater, the past is repetition itself, but the future is that which is repeated. Furthermore, the secret of repetition as a whole lies in that which is repeated, in that which is twice signified. The future, which subordinates the other two to itself and strips them of their autonomy, is the royal repetition. The first synthesis concerns only the content and the foundation of time; the second, its ground; but beyond these, the third ensures the order, the totality of the series and the final end of time.

Gilles Deleuze,  Difference and repetition, 1994 pp. 93-94  

I have been caught up in a web of dense memories of which I don't know exactly why they insist on overlapping my conscience, producing folds, paradoxically, from my own unconscious. Why do these memories still persist? What is hidden inside the memory that moves time and crosses it as if it were gravity? Why do these memories still haunt me? Maybe the memory is in fact gravity. Another type of gravity, a weakened, or not so weakened, gravity that makes my thoughts orbit my own time in search of an answer whose rhetoric is itself the bottom of time and memory. Or rather, memory orbits thought around its own axis, building its foundation in time, to the same extent that it produces the blazing desire for tomorrow. Tomorrow is only possible at the most extreme limits of memory, in other words, in the possibility of memory building a complex process of imagination.

The memories that cross my mind, are the same that tear my flesh and bones and that have been forming immense wounds throughout my existence. I was forced to grow up before the expected time, I was forced to understand the world exclusively from the pain that the world itself produced in me, materializing the singular movements of my own memory for eternity: my most intense memories, which make my sleep nights waver, are precisely those that bring to my body deep waves of pain. The memories are vivid and their vivacity is reflected in pain. Real pain that my thoughts somatize and make me agonize day after day, night after night... memory after memory.

Psychology in general seeks to refer to childhood to understand the chronic processes of illness that affect young adults. This thesis is not completely wrong, as in fact childhood (and thus the "past") produces resonances in adult life ("present-future"). However, it fades in its own misunderstanding of time, the folds of time, and the singular processes of production of worlds that distort the experience itself with and in time. If the "idea" of childhood is socially produced given the very codifications of each culture, we can expect that the illness processes are likewise encoded in the very dynamics that make our cultures toxic in a all-pernicious dynamic. This is not exactly related to childhood and the traumas experienced in it, but in a much more intense way to the continuities of the sicking processes and the impossibility of cure in societies so toxic over time and the experiences that were built with it. What I mean is very simple: our whole society is built for the continuity of pain processes. To the extent that, fundamentally, our societies are built with pain as its main pillar. Therefore, it is this device that comes into question and must necessarily orbit the teraupeutic analyzes that resort to childhood research. In short, how can we make the memories of pain flow into the limbo of oblivion?

If we continue to understand our relationship with time in a continuous, apparently fluid and intelligible way, we will certainly not be able to critically tension the folds that time itself produces in our subjectivity. Directly and simply (and somewhat naively): what if the future is the past? What if the present time is an incessant plunge into the lava of demolition and reconstruction of the past? Which "chronological" line of the construction of experience should we follow, an increasing one - leading to the future of recollections - or a downward trend - leading to a past of regrets? Where, how and at what moment do we perceive precisely the present? The answer to these rather ephemeral questions lies on the fringes, on the edges of memory itself.

The edge of memory is the borderline region between forgetfulness and the possibility of remembering, a fine line between different dimensions of time materializing in a chaotic way in what we, by pure convention, are used to call present. It is, therefore, a border region from which one can glimpse the formation of pure singularity, in the aberrant movements of subjectivity, and at the same time the manifesting leisure of imprisonment and control. Manipulating pain is a productive way of producing government regimes (of the body, mind, sexuality, gender, etc.) and therefore memory is always a collective assemblage whose lines of force gravitate control and subjection mechanisms. The control of memory (and more precisely of collective social memory) is therefore a device of subjection and extraordinary manipulation perpetrated in modes of government whose engineering is extremely well elaborated.

However, it is evident that there are lines of escape. Such lines of escape, oddly enough, operate in the very processes of individuation of memory as well as in the friction that invariably occurs from the incandescent movements of space-time and the production of desire. The process of individuation of memory, in general, is the interiorization of a collective movement in the intimate plane of subjectivity, that is, a "drag" of a molar agent in the molecular plane of the individual's experience, so that the molecular continues to produce vibrations or fissures in the molar structures. Here, this process unfolds in two movements that apparently follow opposite lines without necessarily departing: the first concerns the subject's own reduced experience, that is, his most intimate experiences and his relationship with the world. It is from that moment that individual memory becomes established on the plane of consciousness. For example, the memories we have of things we once experienced, whether positive or negative. the second, more complex, concerns the echoes and resonances of the experience in the unconscious. In general, in this dimension it is "trauma" - understood here as a production of suffering in a cyclical movement - that constitutes our relationship with the world. This means that at some level - from the smallest to the most absurdly giant - we all go through traumatic processes, because the production of pain is the synthesis of our society. At this level, memory is activated in a chaotic way: such activation can occur in the materialization of trauma as a chronic process of illness (depression), in the objectification of nightmares, in the construction of schizophrenia and other processes of mental illness or even in sudden changes of humor from certain everyday experiences that resonate in remembrances. Perhaps a good example will be given here from Estamira. Estamira's illness process, as well as her world in abyss, has its epicenter in the very traumas that inscribed in the deepest layers of her unconsciousness. In this case, "going crazy" means to create for yourself a route of escape, that is, it allows the inauguration of a "tomorrow". A "tomorrow" that anesthetizes suffering.

On the other hand, the tensions of gravitational movements in space-time allow the "game" of memory to be articulated in order to overcome the traumas given the reconfigurations of the "landscape" of space in the course of time. Here is an operation, which, oddly enough, can be explained by the theory of relativity: in short, time affects space and vice versa. This means that we can build "creative" relationships with the illness processes over time as we are able to articulate, verbalize, and reinvent our own, more intimate world; one clue here is the capacity for imagination. However, it is true that the opposite can also happen and peculiar processes of illness can be triggered, which is precisely why I call this aspect "incandescent space-time movement or friction". In its dual vector, I quote a very personal example, I managed to negotiate intimately some of my traumas by moving away from people and places that materialized the presence of pain, but this was only possible to the extent that I managed to rework my relationship with time. However, when I moved to another city, without completely getting rid of the pain (I'm not even sure if it's possible), other illness processes were inaugurated and Manaus became a place of deep anguish and stress. I almost died, literally, from so much that I hit my head on the wall during a psychotic break caused by the deep stress that opened up in that city.

Finally, the desire. That dimension of intimate experience that Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet (1998) call revolutionary because it requires multiple forms of connections with the real. The desire that, at this conjuncture, operates as an intensive flow, a movement whose speed occurs in the order and materiality of reality, of its urgencies and not necessarily on its faults. In other words, desire is a space of affectation of the possible and that is why it is revolutionary, precisely to the extent that it invests and bet in the movements and articulations of the real, re-elaborating, rearranging, the fracturing and / or destructuring it according its needs to open up and dip into a space of immanence. Desire access the memory ( or the contrary?) in order to create a new world, to establish the possibility of re-opening not only a more productive relationship with the self, but to rearticulate the very plane of the individual existence: the life that springs up and persists.

The edge of memory can be considered, therefore, as an event horizon. The most fragile and "careless" gesture can make you succumb to traumatic processes or allow you to access the creative plane of singularity. Operating on and over the edge of memory is a huge challenge as, as I said, the world is a production of radioactive pain. But we know that we are, above all, the "minority" of the world, compulsorily dragged into this chaotic and desolate place. Jota Mombaça (2017), in an exceptional text entitled The world is my trauma, alerts us:

To those of us whose social existence is colored by terror; those of us for whom peace has never been an option; to those of us who were made among apocalypses, daughters of the end of the world, cursed heirs to a war forged against and by default of us; those of us whose pains converge like rivers hiding in the earth; those of us who look closely at the crack in the world, and who refuse to exist as if it had not broken: they will come to kill us, because they do not know that we are unkillable. They do not know that our impossible lives manifest in each other. Yes, they will tear us apart, because they do not know that, once in pieces, we will spread out. Not as a people, but as a plague: at the very heart of the world, and against it (p. 1).

In any case, given the very extent of the pain, we will die. No, we will not die, we will be killed! For a long time I have been walking on my own pain and the pain produced by the world in me, in my soul, my essence, and in my flesh. For a long time I have been dying in the agonizing attempt to overcome the past that they have invented for me as much as the future that they have promised for me. What remains is the "here and now", in a bloody struggle for freedom, for the absolution of my traumas, my most intimate fears and conflicts. But in every fight, the images of violence tear my memory into a thousand pieces and I feel the pain annihilate my core, the most beautiful and untouchable layers of my existence.

I died a long time ago desperately trying to live… my depression has no cure and now I can only write, from the edges of my memory, to, as a last gesture, make the world dive into the very apocalypse that it caused me. My mission is to transmit messages. Warning messages in space-time, such as gravity, in the hope of someday or century, someone, somewhere, can capture them and thus reinvent the world. After transmitting these messages, my mission will be accomplished. I'm really tired. This struggle that lasts decades has really tired me… I'm just very tired. Living on the edge of the world, in the limbo of existence on the limits of memory has been strenuous. The images that memory brings to me fade in themselves, creating a ghostly background of successive losses and disappointments. With that the pain makes my body agonize. My memories are also built on the things I have never experienced. It resides in the dream of experiencing things that have been denied to me by the world. The memory of what I have not lived is the memory of the desire to touch them only once and thus feel the breeze caress my face, triggering a smile of joy...

To imagine the tomorrow is all we have left. It is the unique seed of utopia, that gesture that moves us to believe in creation and the thirst to inhabit the future. Not that future they designed for us, but the embryonic future that can only be reached in the most intimate plunge of our own darkness.

Bibliographic references:

DELEUZE, Gilles. Difference and repetition. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994 

DELEUZE, Gilles; PARNET, Claire. Diálogos. São Paulo: Escuta, 1998
MOMBAÇA, Jota. O mundo é meu trauma. PISEAGRAMA, Belo Horizonte, nº 11, pp. 20 - 25, 2017.