Verbatim quote · defining passage

“Originary memory is taking care of language—by which I don’t mean trying to maintain it as a transparent vehicle of communication, or ensuring that words be used in their proper meaning; what I mean is that everything anyone says makes it possible to say something else that couldn’t have been said otherwise, and that in articulating one of those things that couldn’t have been said otherwise one remembers by carrying forward the very first utterance that made everything said since then possible. It is by thus heading back into the past, enriching the originary scene with everything that has happened since and therefore, in a sense, happened there, is still happening there, that we open up possible futures.”

— Adam Katz, Originary Memory · Feb 2014 · GABlog