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The lost mariner” is the second story from the book “The man who mistook his wife for a hat”. It tells of the case of a patient suffering from the Korsakov Syndrome and therefore unable to remember an event for more than a few moments, yet at the same time he retains a strong and incredibly vivid memory of his youth, but only up to 30 years before his real age. The case describes a man who is convinced to be 18 but in actual fact he is 49; his memories are all set in the past which is his present because the past is all he is aware of. He has no perception of the present: he doesn’t think, he doesn’t reflect about himself, he doesn’t perceive himself, he cannot relate to anything. He cannot write because he’s incapable of articulate reasoning (he immediately forgets phrases and intentions), he cannot read because every word is new to him. Having no past, he can recognise neither objects nor people because he forgets them within moments. In front of a mirror he is horrified seeing his real age but away from the mirror he forgets his horror too after a moment. He lives in a world of brief, isolated sensations, an endless melancholy caused by his non-existence and the only thing able to engage him temporally is the performance of automatic or emotive rituals: taking part in a religious service or gardening. I believe this means that it is the liturgy, being part of a familiar, regular, reassuring mechanism without variables that is able to free him of his illness. Within representation, in a familiar place such as a garden: all in all it is harmony that allows him to gain existential continuity, embracing a sort of physical and mental inertia. I took this photo at the Napoleonic Gardens in Venice, in June 2002. I was focusing on a tree, thinking about the idea of a garden in the story. The bark could resemble the cerebral cortex I thought - I was trying to understand how I could use this idea when something brushed against my leg: a child was going away holding his Mother’s hand: in the child I saw the character from the story’s self loss, in the bark I saw this lost memory found again in the garden. I quickly took the first shot of the bark under-exposed at 1/8, I then took other six on the same negative and finally I moved the frame and included the child who was already far off. The single tree had become a procession of trees and also a thick pressing material, the child an icon of forgetfulness and distance, his hand, stretched cut out of the frame towards a lost grip. |