Yambo “Ecos” Tradition?

Though Orthodox and Catholic Christians may disagree on Tradition, at least they appreciate and, to the best of their ability, understand and adhere to it. Our Protestant brethren? Not so much.

The following passage, from Umberto Eco’s “The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana,” is from the main character who is suffering amnesia. I think it also speaks, in a way, to Tradition:

“Yesterday evening … in the hospital, I was bored, and I started humming a tune to myself. It was automatic, like brushing my teeth … I tried to fugure out how I knew it. I started to sing it again, but once I began thinking about it, the song no longer came of its own accord, and I stopped on a single note. I held it a long time, at least five seconds, as if it were an alarm or a dirge. I no longer knew how to go forward, and I didn’t know how to go forward because I had lost what came before. That’s it, that’s how I am. I’m holding a long note, like a stuck record, and since I can’t remember the opening notes, I can’t finish the song. I wonder what it is I’m supposed to finish, and why. While I was singing without thinking I was actually myself for the duration of the memory, which in that case was what you might call throat memory, with the befores and afters linked together, and I was the complete song, and every time I began it my vocal cords were already preparing to vibrate the sounds to come. I think a pianist works that way, too: even as he plays one note he’s readying his fingers to strike the keys that come next. Without the first notes, we won’t make it to the last ones, we’ll come untuned, and we’ll succeed in getting from start to finish only if we somehow contain the entire song within us. I don’t know the whole song anymore. I’m like … a burning log. The log burns, but it has no awareness of having once been a part of a whole trunk nor any way to find out that it has been, or to know if it caught fire. So it burns up and that’s all. I’m living in pure loss.”

Giambattista “Yambo” Bodoni in Umberto Eco’s “The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana,” pp.36-37.

Eco’s been featured here before.