So much depends on the tensive brutality of the seemingly random association. This brutality marshals a confrontation between witnessing and whimsy.

One pursues the gossamer trace threading the luminous mundanity of partially and imperfectly recalled memories, which are scattered like unset jewels on the black velvet of consciousness, tempting one with their lustrous disorder to order them into proper ornaments.

The imagination, a rowdy nation of images, remains eternally prone to disorder, to an-archy. This constant condition begs intervention for the purpose of bringing this nation to order. This domestication, this domiciliation of the imagination, suggests a homology between ordering and containing, though the second can only offer a very tenuous and uncertain sense of the first. For the febrile restlessness of the imagination is not purged from it, but simply housed, just as a sanatorium contains and isolates individuals no less ill or contagious for being contained.

The relationship, then, between image and memory is one of mutual infection. Both burn from le mal du archive. . .