Icarus @ 59 # 155

I was sent this picture yesterday and I like it. It is a picture of a 3D collage (by the look of it) and I like the way it has been cut and pasted into its box. I am not actually sure this is the way it hangs or whether that matters. And yet that idea of whether it matters suddenly had me thinking about something Marcel Proust once wrote about what matters and of nostalgia, "Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were." I have been accused of being nostalgic in this blog, and I suppose I am to an extent. Thus it seemed natural that I did some research on it (and also because I am writing a paper for a conference in Madrid and nostalgia comes into it). Giorgio Agamben writes, "Remembrance restores possibility to the past, making what happened incomplete and completing what never was. Remembrance is neither what happened nor what did not happen but, rather, their potentialisation, their becoming possible once again." It is a re-writing in our own image, the potentialisation of what was and could have been as it comes to be refracted in our own mind's eye. And that is what this guitar collage says to me, for it is not a guitar at all but a remembrance made up of the component parts which I can assemble in my head to be really real. In other words, I can see the possibilities, I can see the story of what it is/was and what it can be. Music does that for me too and Dear Someone, by Gillian Welch, I'll build a boat, steady and true... has just got to be about guitars and possibilities (and I love the guitar David Rawlings is playing on this, its a 1935 Epiphone Olympic which would be pretty well rubbish in anyone else's hands but it suits their sound). Restoring possibility to the past... completing what never was, it also rings with the lyrical future of nostalgia, does it not?