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Appears in:
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Southerly
The Lives of Others
vol.
78
no.
2
2018
16854409
2018
periodical issue
“Doesn’t a breath of the air that pervaded earlier days caress us as well? in the voices we hear, isn’t there an echo of now silent ones? ... if so, then there is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Then our coming was expected on earth” (Benjamin 390). What does it mean to be in secret agreement with people and places that came before? To recognise that coming after is a matter not just of influence, but also the taking on of certain obligations—for example, to return, to pay tribute, to make amends, to put to rest? for Walter Benjamin the challenge in writing about the past is not to achieve a faithful reconstruction of an earlier period. it is to grasp moments of correspondence between the past and the present that otherwise would fall prey to the ever-present forces of amnesia. nowhere is the call of Southerly this precarious correspondence more acutely registered than in writings and forms of creative practice that are located in the movement between one generation and the next. it is here that remembrance comes face to face with the unfinished business of people, places and events that demand some-thing of us.
2018
pg.
160-167
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