The process of intuitive following of reflections is very much a perpetual spiraling. As one reflection of a memory or a feeling leads to another, it occurs that the path keeps getting projected further and further with each increment. Mundane objects and accidental scenes within immediate surroundings then potentially serve as triggers that kick off the momentum even without one’s intention, consent or desire. What going down that road and tracing the line eventually reveals is a structure of connections underpinned by memories. 

In his novel À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time or Remembrance of Things Past), Marcel Proust has defined the notion of involuntary memory by depicting the narrator getting overwhelmed by a stream of recollections after dipping a madeleine in a cup of tea. The effect was not induced by the madeleine nor by the tea per se but by the association the taste had with his childhood; the madeleine, the tea and the ritual were only stimuli of the burst of memories that revealed underlying wistfulness.

What Proust outlines not only with the principles he is writing about but even more so with the way he writes about them is the same dynamic of remembering and the structure it holds. While he informed my methods and helped me identify the motivation behind them as well as influencing the poetic note of Tea Soaked Madeleines, it is the contemplations of Walter Benjamin that helped me understand what underlays them all. When discussing the outlines set by Proust in his essay on the novel, Walter Benjamin pictures Proust’s writing as a dense “weaving of memories” but also turns the image negative and emphasizes the role and the importance of forgetting as that which more definitely shapes the structure.

Now, the resonance of forgetting feels like it actually might be what I was looking for all along. With the medium of photography, we cannot capture the forgotten so the only way we can at least contour it, is by its imprint on the remembered, the captured. The motivation for remembering therefore must be kept in charge even if the unknown presence can’t be fully fathomed because it is remembering that helps in dealing with it.

“We know that Proust did not, in his work, describe a life as it had been but a life as the person who had lived it remembered that life. Yet even that is obscure and put far too coarsely. Because here, so far as the reminiscing author is concerned, the chief role is played not by what he experienced but by the weaving together of his memories, Penelope’s labour of bearing things in mind. Or should we perhaps talk instead of Penelope’s labour of forgetting? For surely involuntary bearing in mind, Proust’s mémoire involuntaire, is much closer to forgetting than to what is usually referred to as memory? And surely this labour of spontaneously bearing things in mind, in which remembering is the weft and forgetting the warp is actually the opposite of Penelope’s labour, not its likeness. For this is where day undoes what night had brought about. Waking up each morning we hold in our hands, usually feebly and slackly, only frayed scraps of the tapestry of lived existence, as forgetting has woven it within us. Yet each day, with its purposive actions and even more with its purpose-rooted recall unpicks the web, the ornamentation of forgetting.” 

— Walter Benjamin, Picturing Proust