Under the pretext of a funeral, I would like to talk about what people do when confronted with irreversible events, inevitable actions that we do not know how to cope with. About emotions prettied up by convention, about intimacies forcibly exposed to the group. How we look at others and how others see us. About the private and the social, the personal and the public.

We are all equal, we all go through the same things and we all need the same thing, yet still we persist in believing that we are different; in pretending we are special, unique. We all believe that fate holds something different in store for us. “It might happen to anyone, but it won’t happen to me.”

We are aware of the reality, but all of us are attracted by fantasy, we let ourselves be carried away by our imagination, and this is essentially our guide on the path of life. Because… there are so many questions to which we do not know the answer… We need to clarify what is dark, put a name to what we do not know, to everything we cannot explain – like life and death – even when this means using a new concept that we also cannot define, such as God, the Unconscious, Destiny, Soul, Spirit, the afterlife. And well, that way we have greater peace of mind.

But… What is real and what is imagined? What is the truth? Maybe that’s the problem: that the truth calls for too much imagination, it’s too abstract. Maybe that’s why humanity tries to avoid it, to leave it cloudy, hazy… Without thinking. Perhaps that’s why memory is distorted. Memory is inaccurate, and truth is replaced by fiction; by what imagination reveals to us.

Memory is, unfortunately, the only relationship we can have with the dead. And from death comes the unknown, the unidentified, the thing we do not know… And this is precisely how imagination and fantasy come about. And this idea can be extrapolated to how this fantasy marks our memory of the past, the unknown future and the radical and difficult present.

If the goal is that there should be some space in which we can live our lives, then memory should be defective and limited. That we should forget. That our inevitable dead end, our fatal destiny, should be fuzzy and cloudy most of the time. Deformed. Deceived. We live in a fantastically imagined world. And this allows us to continue our misfortune, headlong towards death.