WRITING OURSELVES
“… What I discover indirectly has had greater value than that which I have seen with my own eyes. In literature, too, I prefer indirect to direct expression. I like narrative more than lyric poetry. However, I also like lyric poetry; whereas I am less interested in those forms of confidence and confession which are so in vogue nowadays. In them, the writer is not in a pure state, as we are wrongly led to believe: they are in a rough state.”
(from Carlo Cassola’s diary, November 1969)
“Internal identity consists of the personal autobiographical memory. This, on its part, is based on memory fragments, linked to one another by the individual into a narrative.”“All autobiographical narratives are retrospectives (…) In this sense, one can construct a final autobiography only at the moment of death.”
(Agnes Heller “Autobiographical Memory”)
After the death of my parents, after having had to leave the homes where I grew up and having to face boxes and boxes of “stuff” to sort out, but above all after having worked for over a decade on building my archive and having lived more than thirty years alongside a historian husband, today I came across a page of my childhood notes that I am now using to introduce this topic.
The document goes more or less like this:
The importance of studying history.
1 – Selected facts; 2- Meaning for me; 3- On the basis of the future fantastic selection.
When I tell my story, I make a selection of the most important facts about my life for me. However, this selection is far from objective, but is what my mind tends to remember, not the most important facts, but the most significant ones. Even if an event that happened a long time ago apparently does not seem to affect our present, actually it is of great importance. The past is what shapes us, it is our history, our life; we are what we have experienced. It is also important for our imagination, for everything that we imagine and create in our fantastic mind.
What does it mean to construct a representation of ourselves? Why do we make this enormous effort to go back, dismantle and then reconstruct in order to come up with a compact vision? How do we come up with an image firstly for ourselves and then for others of a fragmented sum of stuff? Can these things subsequently create a mass that can be defined part of the body of the artist’s work? Can the autobiographical data affect the artist’s work and if so, how?
In a certain sense this sequence of questions formulated the journey I went on to create this space that is my site. Overall, I could say that it is obviously a confessional, a sort of self-representation and an autobiography divided into pieces made up of events that have been experienced, re-elaborated and reinterpreted. What is constantly brought up are analyses of my inclinations and ways of being, the constant reflections on my work and on the forms that result from it.
Sifting and filtering are the actions that I have had to carry out over the last ten years or so to reach the essence, the embodiment, the synthesis.
Having decided to create a chapter called “Autobiography: Writing Ourselves” was like having wanted to state that the artist can also reflect and contribute in the first person with her own words to formulate a discourse about herself, about her work, about her poetics. And I want to emphasise contribute, not define, because I am convinced that anyone could add something or even reformulate this first interpretation that we give of ourselves.
What I am interested in doing is keeping the potential we have to write about ourselves open rather than actually doing it. And because, as Carlo Cassola says in the quote that opens this chapter “what I have learned indirectly has been of greater value than that which I have seen with my own eyes”.
I would also add that what I have attempted here is just a taste, just an idea of autobiography and is not an actual autobiography. A reconstruction created here in solitude in the form of a monologue doesn’t interest me. Instead, what I would prefer are the versions that others can give of me through an exchange, a dialogue, interviews, conversations…
(Written in 2014. Modified in 2021)
