Emma Bennett

Memory, the faculty of recall, is constantly under threat from subsequent experience. Memory is subject to change. Memories are what you are left with. You protect and guard them in case of loss. A memory clung to desperately will petrify. Over time it will occupy you, slows you up. Memories need to be set free.

Remembrance, the marking of a memory you hold dear, an anchoring with things and images to keep it from drifting. Remembrance is heavy with association, recollection, and retelling, but not too heavy to bear. The flames of remembrance must be tended. They must not overheat.

Dream, a sleep-induced unwinding and entwining of rememberings, images and experience, into which forgotten and discarded memories leak out as repressed and unfulfilled desires. ‘The dream proceeds on its way in linear fashion, forgetting its original path as it hastens along.’i Floating and fleeting through time and space, sense and self, the dream intensifies, only to fade away on waking.

Reverie, the waking dream, the day-dream, a fanciful imagining, contracting and expanding as it passes back and forth, in and out of non-sequential instants. Reverie takes its shape in the presence of fire, flow, or cloud. When induced by an image, one that is neither too specific nor too vague, reverie gives rise to a pleasurable dislocation, a losing of oneself. In reverie, time is both long and short, objects magnified and miniaturized, simultaneously.

Imagination, mental worlds invoked by the mind in wakefulness. ‘Material imagination, which always has a demiurgic tonality, would create all white matter from dark matter and overcome the whole history of blackness.ii Imagination makes the familiar strange. It extends the vision and the senses in make-believe. ‘With a single poetic detail, the imagination confronts us with a new world.’iii

Fire, real, fake, fallacious or imagined, is ‘the perpetual antagonist of gravity, giver and destroyer of life.’iv The flames of reverie shoot up, draw breath, suffuse all things with light, and warmth and glow. The picturing of fire, though colder, gives similar rise to reverie.

The extraordinary presence of their work is effected through absence, through its unbridgeable distance from the original, from even the possibility of an original. Such presence is what I attribute to the kind of photographic activity I call postmodernist.x

It is a good thing to gather figs and also not to pass over in silence the figs in this picture. Purple figs dripping with juice are heaped on vine-leaves; and they are depicted with breaks in the skin, some just cracking open to disgorge their honey, some split apart, they are so ripe. … You would say that even the grapes in the painting are good to eat and full of winey juice. And the most charming point of all this is: on a leafy branch is yellow honey already within the comb and ripe to stream forth if the comb is pressed; and on another leaf is cheese new curdled and quivering; and there are bowls of milk not merely white but gleaming, for the cream floating upon it makes it seem to gleam.

[It] ‘takes so subdued a form that we forget the dialectic of the large and the small. … the imagination no longer delineates …The dream withdraws into this interior space and develops in the most paradoxical delight, in the most ineffable happiness.’xvi