Science is making us increasingly aware of the mystery of our memory. Gone is the mechanistic vision: a department, a warehouse, a file. We are beginning to think of other metaphors, organic metaphors, which refer to the dynamic, to action: a web, but more of a web; a plot, perhaps even more of a plot. The philosopher Higinio Marín says in Theory of Mind and the Habits of the Heart (Pre-Textos, 2010): “The preservation of the significant substance of life requires the daily weaving and unweaving of the plot of what we have experienced, as Homer says he did. Penelope every night in her rooms. And sanity is distilled in the patient assimilation of the vicissitudes of one’s own life and the lives of others, and in keeping them in the heart”. The memory of how to knit; the fabric of how to remember in the present; the memory of how to go through the heart again; the cordiality of how to maintain dialogue with oneself and with the world.

And Marín continues: “As Gadamer wanted, memory, much more than a psychological faculty, is the organ of understanding and therefore the seat of the capacity for reality, the exercise of which is called reason”. The artist in particular knows this. He knows about the echoes that come into creation, about how the idea and the process develop in the heart that he remembers. He knows that recipes kill creativity, because they are external prescriptions that stifle the authentic, which only the artist – not an abstraction, but this or that artist – can configure here and now. On the contrary, the artist struggles with what he does not yet understand and exposes himself to indeterminacy and uncertainty; he struggles to understand what he is doing without being able to move to the comfort of a privileged external place, a viewpoint of clarity free from risk; he understands what he is doing in his own doing. He understands from memory, or better, in memory; even better, he understands by being memory, by letting memory emerge to become present. Isn’t the artist’s desire an impulse that comes, excited, imperious, from the unrepeatable mystery of what one is, who one is? Or would he accept to think about creating from outside, beyond and alien to the personal centre? Isn’t that centre what unites what has been and what is yet to be, what has been created and what can be created? Memory and imagination.

A creation from memory that the imagination needs to see what it is looking for, because we need to imagine in order to see what we see. The artist will find no other way than to imagine; and in doing so you will find it difficult, impossible, to separate memory from imagination, because it will seem to you that what you imagine was already in some way potential and nebulous in the tissue of the heart, that organ of memory and understanding; and that memory only comes alive when it vibrates in dialogue with the possible, with the life-giving novelty of new aspects of reality.

The artist welcomes the collective memory that comes to him through tradition; and tradition, an active tradition, lives and is validated in the imaginative dialogue of the artist. The artist embraces tradition and at the same time brings it to life imaginatively. The artist proposes new images with which to capture new aspects of reality. He proposes a reason, an authentic return to the common heart. He reminds us of the need to go through the heart again, to resume the constant exercise of understanding, of ourselves, of the world. He rescues us from the anonymous peripheries where we get lost and blurred. It reminds us how much memory we have, how much imagination we need.

José Manuel Mora-Fandos

Complutense University of Madrid