The memory of the silence

The events of the last century still leave us unable to outline a possible and desirable future. In the meantime the last protagonists perish, witnesses of objective facts, emotions generated by these facts, omissions with which facts were etched in individual and collective memory. This is also the experience of the Author, seven when the war ended. Her memory is made of a silence determined by fear, exhaustion and perhaps the hope her parents had that cutting the thread of memory for their children to become normal adults, out of the hits of the history, could be easier. However, wordless trauma encyst into the body like an unmetabolised food or, as Bion says, like a not alphabetized beta-element. After all, anxiety is the memory of silence, its truth. Unerasable path, it passes from father to son down a secret genealogy of passions. Which is why, like in original sin, mankind suffer also from what they don’t know, from a forgotten guilt that non provides for salvation. According to 17th century Jewish mysticism, when the divine Verb retreats to leave in Its place the world, in the remaining space letters and numbers chaotically wander in spread tatters of the name of God. Then man’s endless task is to collect them, number, rearrange, recombining in words and to connect in stories so that creation could be accomplished, not by God, but by men able to communicate with other men able too to question, listen, understand, keep and pass down.

Keywords: Fear, silence, anxiety, transmission, memory, tale.

Silvia Vegetti Finzi, La memoria del silenzio in "EDUCAZIONE SENTIMENTALE" 28/2017, pp 147-152, DOI: 10.3280/EDS2017-028009