Bergson : On the Survival of Images

In describing the relation of the material world to our present and future, Begson establishes the power of the objects surrounding us. These physical objects form the limits of our future; they define the set of possible new memories we might create. I think it is useful to keep this in mind while designing any work concerning memory. Not only can a work envoke past memories, it will also create new memories. In Bergson's opinion, matter defines memory.

"We have shown that the objects which surround us represent, in varying degrees, an action whcih we can accomplish upon things or which we must experience from them. The date of fulfilment of this possible action is indicated by the greater or lesser remoteness of the corresponding object, so that distance in space measures the proximity of a threat or of a promise in time. Thus space furnishes us at once with the diagram of our near future, and, as this future must recede indefinitely, space which symbolizes it has for its property to remain, in its immobility, indefinitely open." -144

"If matter, so far as extended in space, is to be defined (as we believe it must) as a present which is always beginnning again, inversely, our present is the very materiality of our existence, that is to say a system of sensations and movements and nothing else." -139

He clarifies his conception of the present as a state of "universal becomming." The present is constantly making itself anew.

"We reply that the question is just whether the past has ceased to exist or whether it has simply ceased to be useful. You define the present in an arbitrary manner as THAT WHICH IS, whereas the present is simply WHAT IS BEING MADE. Nothing IS less than the present moment, if you understand by that the indivisble limit which divides the past from the future. When we think this present as going to be, it exists not yet, and when we think it as existing, it is already past" -150

We move between our near and distant past in varrying degrees. In order to return to memories, we make them part of our present. Another way to look at it is that we physically place ourself in the past in order to remember, or the past becomes material when we remember.

"But the truth is that we shall never reach the past unless we frankly place ourselves within it. Essentially virtual, it cannot be known as something past unless we follow and adopt the movement by which it expands into a present image, thus emerging from obscurity into the light of day." -135

"... from the moment that is becomes image, the past leaves the state of pure memory and coincides with a certain part of my present" -140

"What we have to explain, then, is no longer the cohesion of internal states, but the double movement of contraction and expansion by which conciousness narrows or enlarges the development of its content." -166

From this conception of the mind, we can see how any two images might be in some way connected.

"To take similarity first: however profound are the differences which separate two images, we shall always find, if we go back high enough, a common genus to which they belong, and, consequently, a resemblance which may serve as a connecting link between them" -163

I think last point is interesting when we compare it to the narrative techniques of Legrady and Calvino. Given a number of images, we can draw connections between the two and begin to form a narrative out of the distant pieces. The result is more than the individual images alone as the connections between the images become the foundation of the story.