Outlook Anniversary Issue: Well-Kept Ruins of Memory And Time

I remember, is this what you call remembering? Walking briskly, our Stroll takes us past the Dom, we don’t go into the cathedral, nor the cloister, now left and left again to the corner where through a window we see the tombs in the pretty garden of roses and tombs—all archbishops—old tombs eternally young garden roses don’t count the centuries, peace slumbers here, a little dream in time’s strict enclosure, instead we walk a hundred metres further along the square, immense, as usual, an esplanade vast as a ream of white paper champing at the bit for the lines and signs to be set down, we’ll come back, let’s keep moving along the Hegerstrasse we’ll be back, past the Hegertor, at the same brisk pace, as if we’re in a rush, Mama, as if she knows where we are going, advances with the firm gait of her sturdy shoes, I don’t know how to say this in German, this is a word for my mother, a word with go and god, something martial, that knows our destination, ‘it’s as lovely as ever’ we think, a sentence that shows our state of mind and in the air, something uplifting, a breath of wind that seems by definition to be part of the City, part of Every City, yet we don’t expect such beauty in a geographically chilly Hanoverian city historically watered by a few rivers of blood and streams of tears like my mother’s genealogy that it be full of flowers and beautiful up above is a sign, each time this sentence pops up, it is our whole human condition that, with a sigh, we are reminded of, hence this is the same sun that shone on the ramparts in the Iliad, Canto 3, of which I speak, the morning when I arose softly weeping, writes Helen the White of Hand, in a dream in which I watched myself weave a great piece of fabric on which I would depict the battles between the horse people of Troy and the bronze-cuirassed Achaeans, I sensed this was an allegory, not a dream, it would depict reality, everyone was filled with desire for a cruel war, and I too was cruel and full of desire’s anguish, as usual, as since each of my childhoods in my memory of the dream, Helen noted, some people walked over other people while they cried like birds, others advanced in silence, that’s all that remains of my dream, the cries and the silence that resounded like the ebbing of a furious sob, that’s all, those two opposed sounds and next thing I see myself climbing to the city ramparts, I find Priam my old father-in-law, waiting for me on the wall beside the Tower, and his old face radiates a strong childlike curiosity, the old gentleman says: Come up here and tell me who that fellow is down there, far, far away, bigger than life, since he seems a good head taller than all the others, and carries himself like an actor, some spectacular thirties show, I’d rather not speak of him, he’s Agamemnon, the brother-in-law of the woman I was but this is all so distant now, it is part of another story, or another dream, ‘if ever there was one,’ Helen the Troy weaver tells herself and this expression that thinks with such vigour, that makes life and the earth tremble, shakes me like an apocalypse, cries like Act V Scene 5 in the tragedy, this trembling relationship of the past in the present, if this past was ever true, such is the pain for which literature prepares a bed and a refuge, if one day, to be sure, that day ever was, this is what I was, the sentence’s shadow murmurs, if—(that)—day—ever was, but the sky, the sky is so lovely, an immortal blue, like the sky on 1 March 1571, the anniversary of the day of his birth, when he was still burning to write the completely naked book of his whole and wholly naked self, Montaigne enters—for the small portion of life that remains to him—the volume of the library-sanctuary dedicated to painting, to remembering and which contains all the books that silently meditate, within his soul he has Rome and Paris and all time, and from the third floor of his library he overlooks the forest and the extraordinarily clear blue sky, once he is within himself then he imagines, he conceives in his soul the City become Book placeless stoneless plasterless woodless and completely immortal, the narrower the room’s furniture, the farther and more boundless the soul’s vision, and the sky with all its stars covers the ground floor as in a drawing by Kepler, which in no way keeps it from being as blue as midday.

Let’s get back to our stroll, what a beautiful day it is in Osnabrück, the sky and the blueness of its fabric, we think, as magical as a theatre curtain, all we have to do is contemplate it, rapt as the watchman who embraces all time in the staircase of Sodom and Gomorrah, and we are transported, my mother and I, into the generations and archives of our interior and outer towers, what is strange, I tell my daughter, is that I was born for the first time, of my father, in a city without towers and without a river. From then on I was always born of my mother, with a tower and river from one city to the next.

If you can call it a Stroll, our hasty, forgetful walk, which leads us along the Hexengang, ineluctably, towards the Hase, the destination and end of Witches Road. It’s so short but it is long. It is charming, we forget about the terror, we feel ourselves alive, violently, the little brick pavers are still as red today as they were five hundred years ago, the play of light and shadow, the sense that the Gang is long is no doubt due to the street’s different parts, a tunnel with the feeling of a distant horizon, a bend, another, a section that slopes down between two high walls which, were it longer, would feel oppressive, prisonlike, all the impressive charms of a labyrinth, the modest defile between two serious-looking, imposing buildings to the right of the Dom, to the left of the Carolinum Gymnasium between Church and Empire, only between noon and two o’clock does the sun manage to let a little light into the darkness of the human heart.

Hélène Cixous is a French-Algerian writer and seminal feminist theorist, who co-founded Paris VIII and created Europe’s first women’s studies centre, shaping ideas of écriture féminine (women’s writing)

This article appeared as 'Well-Kept Ruins' in Outlook’s 30th anniversary double issue ‘Party is Elsewhere’ dated January 21st, 2025, which explores the subject of imagined spaces as tools of resistance and politics.