I’ve been slowly making my way through this book. which is really a collection of essays and articles, on various themes – the book title is ” Species of Spaces and other pieces”. I bought it last week and don’t intend now to read it all the way through, but just to dip in from time to time.
SPACE (CONTINUATION AND END) P.91
After reading Meeka Walsh’s quotes on ‘Species …’ I wanted to check those passages to see if there were other relevant passages to my proposed work from this section. Sure enough, following the quote in the second paragraph of Walsh’s article that I cited, Perec goes on to say, ” … I shall look at a few yellowing photographs with broken edges without recognising them.” This reminds me so much of opening my wallet, seeing the first documents (passes to enter the university building, where I researched in the mid-seventies, outside normal hours) and not remembering them at all at first, then they suddenly snapped into my active memory.
The last sentences of ‘Species …’ are also powerful ; ” Space melts like sand running through one’s fingers. Time bears it away and leaves me only shapeless shreds.
To write and try to meticulously to retain something, to cause something to survive; to wrest a few precise scraps from the void as it grows, to leave somewhere a furrow, a trace, a mark or a few signs.
PARIS 1973-1974″
DALI
I had been thinking of Dali’s melting clock metaphor previously. Maybe it can be incorporated with this from Perec?
Reference: Perec, Georges, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, Penguin Classics (2008), p.91
