Souviens-toi d’avant l’aube

There is a block of wax within our souls, upon which our memories are imprinted. 

This is the gift of Memory, mother of the Muses.

Plato

How far back can I remember?

On stage, a mother and a daughter. Nathalie Dauchez, actress, mother of Thylda Barès, actress. The story of her birth is told to the daughter. From this starting point, this first memory, we will ask for the impossible: the memory of what came before…

Before I was in your womb, Mom, where was I?

We won’t have it; we’ll dream it… We’ll try to open up that space in the psyche where memory, reverie, imagination, and projection coexist, overlap, and inspire one another—where “memory dreams, and reverie remembers.” (Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie)

And what if the girl, now a woman, as she moves through the generations,
and if the girl were to lose her memory.
What if forgetfulness were to set in?
What if all she had left were songs, only songs etched into her memory?
But no more names, no more faces, almost no more words…

If there were only one taste left to him, deep within his songs, the taste of memory…

… “of what I don’t remember, of what existed even before I was, of what is within me that is not me… I know that I remember. This memory does not belong to me; it defines me just as much. The landscape opens up, life takes shape. The bridges from my story to my imagination of it—or within it—are the stuff of my daydreams.”

… « de ce dont je ne me souviens pas, de ce qui est avant même que je sois, de ce qui est en moi qui n’est pas moi… Je sais que je me souviens. Ce souvenir ne m’appartient pas, il me fonde tout autant. Le paysage s’ouvre, la vie s’échafaude. Les passerelles de mon histoire à mon imagination d’elle, ou en elle, sont la matière de ma rêverie. »