Georgi Gospodinov

If we are not in someone else’s memory, do we even exist at all?

Her image starts to float up from the nothingness, like photos out of the chemical bath of a darkroom.

According to the statistics, every three seconds someone in the world developed dementia.

Her nephew hugs her . . . I’m not sure she even notices him, he is absent from this memory, she is now in 1944

The past grows like a weed

Then, in the afternoon of 1968 or 2020, it was one and the same afternoon at the end of the day,

first photograph of Jupiter’s rings sent by Voyager

Unwittingly you realize how many things in a clinic are potentially charged with hidden violence, as Foucault would say.

mass loss of memory could be something like a virus that reaches the hippocampus, destroys brain cells, blocks neurotransmitters. And the brain, that supreme creation of nature, is transformed into a pulpy mass in the span of a year or so. Several world-renown scientists offered bees as an example and warned that what is happening with their mysterious disappearance, so-called colony collapse disorder, is actually the same as what the Alzheimer’s mechanism does to the human family

If I’m not in his memory, do I exist at all?