“Some have the gift to change and change again in many forms, like Proteus, creature of the encircling seas, who sometimes seemed a lad, sometimes a lion, sometimes a snake men feared to touch, sometimes a charging boar, or else a sharp-horned bull; often he was a stone, often a tree, or feigning flowing water seemed a river or water’s opposite, a flame of fire.”
animation by Dorijan Kolundzija
For the old nurse, the sight of Odyseus’s scar triggers the memory of his naming. For Odysseus himself, the scar evokes powerful memories of the events of the boar hunt during which he sustained the wound. Each remembers as a story what the other remembers as a powerful moment of lived experience. Each narrative is bounded by and bonded to the other, linked through the visual mark of the scar. Their memories overlap, over the boundaries of time, space and
absence.
“I saw in a dream one of our sisters who had died some time previous. She told me that she suffered much in Purgatory, but that God had inflicted upon her a suffering which surpassed all other pains, by showing her one of her near relatives in hell.”
(quoted from Purgatory)