“Time is a thing that you can see, but not touch. And everything you see is out of focus and indistinct”… Wong Kar-wai
The time of diegesis (narrative; from the Greek dia—through—and hegeomai—to lead, to guide a narration—as opposed to mimesis, or direct representation) is my past. The setting of this period is explored like a well-delineated painting of wild years, extraordinary years, in a nostalgic city, iridescent and kaleidoscopic.
My re-evocation ends up being the recreation of a time transfigured in my memory, updated not through the historical-political upheavals that troubled those years, but through the sphere of my private feelings and emotions; preserving innocence and a subtle moralism. My sentimentality is a touching reminiscence that serves to induce a moral behavior. My past is revived and reread through the filter of memories; it manages to capture the atmosphere of time—nostalgic and static—in which a gesture, however minimal, prevails over the word; in which a gaze alludes to a hand you graze.
It is, perhaps, a time dissolved forever that one wishes to leave behind too quickly. The state of mind in which every image drowns is nostalgia. They speak of a past still too alive in my mind, mythologized and transformed into an archetype. The past entails longing, nostalgia for an abolished, forgotten time; it expresses everything that could have been and has not been.
The reminiscence of not living within the landscape and the time that my memory evokes reveals, ultimately, the desire for something different from the present moment. A languid and inescapable yearning, tempestuous, perceived as inaccessible; an irremediable loss: Paradise. A nostalgia populated by individuals pursued by memories, as if their history, unable to be rewritten any further, continues to haunt them, buried in the deepest part of themselves. My inadequacy toward the present indicates affliction, a saudade. The melancholy awareness that the present is about to dissolve, to exist no more.
So, if the present is ambiguous and elusive, nothing remains but to traverse a time of dreams. A golden age in which one was truly happy. Paradise Lost, mythologized by the disenchanted eyes of one who has been submerged in a squalid today. The past materializes through the senses, surfacing in my memories, populated by symbolic figures. In images crystallized in a moment without time or space, those years constitute the age of innocence, the place of primordial union; a protective alveolus that becomes, at once, a place of infinite possibilities and of openness to the world. A diegesis in slow motion, a frozen frame, a progressive time whose mechanism, in the end, seems to turn upon itself. Repeating the preceding sequence, re-proposed with slight variations in point of view, dialogue, or entry into the frame, these cyclical situations become systematic, applied with rigor.