A Far Better Thing: This Splendid Terrible Story

Accounts after the collapse of the Wall made a clean sweep

of society’s memory of itself — that great project pursued

by many people — weighed down by connotation, a key to lock

the drawer of memories. The men of Monfalcone have great

memory: highly symbolic, packed with truth about the last

century — a Gramscian matrix now closed. If instead we probe

the memory of less prominent figures — each lost in individual

mazes — the lock springs open and memories pull out. Sentences

swollen with rhetoric — carved into flesh and blood — words

which made people — and gave direction to their lives. Onlookers

try to limit this vision of evils that could only end in this way: still

present in faces who those who retell their splendid terrible stories.

. . . . .

Poet: Susan Powers Bourne

Source: Andrea Berrini: A Far Better Thing I Do

Process: Redacted text / montage