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ОглавлениеNOTE BOOK I
MYTH
The Liquefaction of Time
THE APHORISMS
Every act of memory is an act of forgetting.
The tree of memory set its roots in blood.
To secure an ideal, surround it with a moat of forgetfulness.
To study the self is to forget the self.
In forgetting lies the liquefaction of time.
The Furies bloat the present with the undigested past.
“Memory and oblivion, we call that imagination.”
We dream in order to forget.
TO THE READER. “Whoever wants really to get to know a new idea does well to take it up with all possible love, to avert the eye quickly from, even to forget, everything about it that is objectionable or false. We should give the author of a book the greatest possible head start and, as if at a race, virtually yearn with a pounding heart for him to reach his goal. By doing this, we penetrate into the heart of the new idea, into its motive center: and this is what it means to get to know it. Later, reason may set its limits, but at the start that overestimation, that occasional unhinging of the critical pendulum, is the device needed to entice the soul of the matter into the open,” says Nietzsche.
MIRACULOUS. Replying to a question about the effort he put into composing with chance operations, John Cage said, “It’s an attempt to open our minds to possibilities other than the ones we remember, and the ones we already know we like. Something has to be done to get us free of our memories and choices.”
Or he once said, “This is . . . why it is so difficult to listen to music we are familiar with; memory has acted to keep us aware of what will happen next, and so it is almost impossible to remain alive in the presence of a well-known masterpiece. Now and then it happens, and when it does, it partakes of the miraculous.”
In a nod to his long interest in Buddhist teachings, Cage once released an audio disc titled The Ten Thousand Things, that phrase being the formula by which the old dharma texts refer to the whole of existence, to the fullness of what is, as in the teaching of the thirteenth-century Japanese Zen master Dogen: “To study the Buddha Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to become one with the ten thousand things.”
Note the sequence: First comes study, then forgetting. There is a path to be taken, a practice of self-forgetfulness.
THE TWIN GODDESS. Every act of memory is also an act of forgetting. In Hesiod’s Theogony, Mnemosyne, the mother of the Muses, is not simply Memory, for even as she helps humankind to remember the golden age, she helps them to forget the Age of Iron they now must occupy. Bardic song was meant to induce those twin states: “For though a man have sorrow and grief . . . , yet, when a singer, the servant of the Muses, chants the glorious deeds of men of old and the blessed gods who inhabit Olympus, at once he forgets his heaviness and remembers not his sorrows at all.”
Both memory and forgetting are here dedicated to the preservation of ideals. What drops into oblivion under the bardic spell is the fatigue, wretchedness, and anxiety of the present moment, its unrefined particularity, and what rises into consciousness is knowledge of the better world that lies hidden beyond this one.
I MANUMIT. I HIDE. Let us imagine forgetting by way of two etymologies. The roots of the English “forget” go back to Old High German, where the for- prefix indicates abstaining from or neglecting and the Germanic *getan means “to hold” or “to grasp.” To remember is to latch on to something, to hold it in mind; to forget is to let it slip from consciousness, to drop it. All things grasped by mistake (a wrong impression, a hidden wasp) or by nature slippery (the eels of the mind) or overworked and confined (mind slaves, caged birds) or useless mental furniture (old phone numbers, hobbyhorses) or worn-out attitudes (self-importance, resentment) . . . , in every case to forget is to stop holding on, to open the hand of thought.
Greek terms present a different set of images, not letting go, but erasing, covering up, or hiding (the trail washed away by rain, the love letter thrown in the fire, the buried scat, the wound scabbed over, the gravestone obscured by vines). Forgetfulness in Greek is lethe, in turn related to letho, λήθω (I escape notice, I am hidden), ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *leh2- (to hide). The privative or negative form of this word, a-lethe or aletheia, is the Greek word usually translated as “truth,” the truth then being a thing uncovered or taken out of hiding. In terms of mental life, all that is available to the mind is aletheia; what is not available is for some reason covered, concealed, hidden.
MID-AUGUST AT SOURDOUGH MOUNTAIN LOOKOUT
Down valley a smoke haze
Three days heat, after five days rain
Pitch glows on the fir-cones
Across rocks and meadows
Swarms of new flies.
I cannot remember things I once read
A few friends, but they are in cities.
Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup
Looking down for miles
Through high still air.
—GARY SNYDER
IN THE DESERT. Paul Bowles says that as soon as you arrive in the Sahara you notice the stillness, the “incredible, absolute silence,” especially if “you leave the gate of the fort or the town behind, pass the camels lying outside, go up into the dunes, or out onto the hard, stony plain and stand awhile, alone. Presently, you will either shiver and hurry back inside the walls, or you will go on standing there and let something very peculiar happen to you, something that everyone who lives there has undergone and which the French call le baptême de la solitude. It is a unique sensation, and it has nothing to do with loneliness, for loneliness presupposes memory. Here, in this wholly mineral landscape lighted by stars like flares, even memory disappears; nothing is left but your own breathing and the sound of your heart beating.”
A STORY OUT OF PLATO’S REPUBLIC. A soldier by the name of Er was killed in battle. Days later, as his body lay on the funeral pyre, he came back to life and told of all he had seen in the Land of the Dead.
When his soul had arrived in the otherworld he was told to watch and listen so that he might return as a messenger to the living. He then witnessed the punishing of the wicked and the rewarding of the just. And he saw how all these souls convened to be born again, sometimes after having journeyed in the underworld for a thousand years.
He saw how all were given a chance to choose their lot in life and how they did so according to their wisdom or their foolishness. Their lots having been chosen, and the Fates having spun the threads of each one’s irreversible destiny, they proceeded together in dry and stifling heat across the desert of Lethe. In the evening, they camped by the River of Forgetfulness, whose water no vessel can contain. Great thirst drove them to drink this water—those without wisdom drinking especially deeply. As each man drank, he forgot everything.
Then they slept. During the night, an earthquake came, and thunder, and all were swept up to their next life like a showering of stars.
At the River of Forgetfulness, Er himself was forbidden to drink. He slept, and when he opened his eyes, he found himself lying on the funeral pyre, the sun rising.
“A MUSICAL INSTRUMENT REMINDING YOU . . .” The myth of Er fits neatly with Plato’s theory of knowledge, in which the unborn soul, following “in the train of a god,” comes to know the “absolute realities,” the ideal forms such as beauty, goodness, justice, equality. This knowledge is lost at birth, however, the soul having met “with some mischance,” become “burdened with a load of forgetfulness,” and fallen to earth.
Born into this life, those who seek to recover their lost wisdom need to find a teacher whose task is not to directly teach ideals but rather to remind the student of what the soul already knows. “What we call learning is really just recollection,” says Socrates in the Phaedo. It’s anamnesis, or un-forgetting, the discovering of things hidden in the mind.
Just as when I see a guitar in a shop window and suddenly remember a dream that I forgot when I woke up, so too the student is directed to the particulars of this world that they might trigger recollection of the previously known noble ideals. “At last, in a flash, understanding of each blazes up, and the mind . . . is flooded with light.”
TO SECURE AN IDEAL, surround it with a moat of forgetfulness.
AMERICAN EPISTEMOLOGY. An early chapter of Herman Melville’s Confidence-Man describes an encounter between a man wearing mourning clothes (the con man himself) and a country merchant. When the man in mourning introduces himself as an old acquaintance, the merchant protests: he has no recollection of their ever meeting.
“I see you have a faithless memory,” says the con man. “But trust in the faithfulness of mine.”
“Well, to tell the truth, in some things my memory ain’t of the very best,” replies the puzzled merchant.
“I see, I see; quite erased from the tablet,” says the con man. “About six years back, did it happen to you to receive any injury on the head? Surprising effects have arisen from such a cause. Not alone unconsciousness . . . , but likewise—strange to add—oblivion, entire and incurable.”
He himself, the con man says, was once kicked by a horse and couldn’t remember a thing about it, relying on friends to tell him what happened. “You see, sir, the mind is ductile, very much so: but images, ductilely received into it, need a certain time to harden and bake in their impressions. . . . We are but clay, sir, potter’s clay.”
Drawn in, the merchant confesses that, yes, he once suffered a brain fever and lost his mind for quite some time.
“There now, you see, I was not wholly mistaken. That brain fever accounts for it all,” replies the man in mourning. How sad that the merchant has forgotten their friendship! And, by the way, would he mind loaning “a brother” a shilling?
The whole of The Confidence-Man is a Platonic dialogue for a fallen age. Every episode hangs on the question, should we or shouldn’t we have confidence in the story being told? How are we to know the truth? In the case at hand, the con man’s key move is the erasure of memory; that allows him to detach his claim of old acquaintanceship from the world of empirical knowledge whereupon its veracity becomes a matter of faith. Having accepted the con man’s suggestion—yes, there was brain-fever forgetfulness—the merchant is left with little to go on but the story at hand. And the con man is an artful storyteller. In another country and another time, he could have been a great novelist, but he is on the Mississippi River in the mid-nineteenth century and he’s given himself over to toying with the locals.
Having severed the merchant’s ties to his own recollections, the con man moves in close. “I want a friend in whom I may confide,” he says, and begins to unfold the sad story of his recent grief. Before too long the country merchant finds himself moved beyond the solicited shilling: “As the story went on, he drew from his wallet a bank note, but after a while, at some still more unhappy revelation, changed it for another, probably of a somewhat larger amount.”
In Melville’s America, it’s not light flooding the mind that’s the mark of true belief; it’s money changing hands.
TO SECURE A LIE, surround it with a moat of forgetfulness.
“THE PRECIPITATE” of a sixteen-year exploration, thoughts written down “as remarks, short paragraphs, of which there is sometimes a fairly long chain about the same subject” while at other times “a sudden change, jumping from one topic to another,” says Wittgenstein of his Philosophical Investigations.
“Writer is weary unto death of making up stories,” writes David Markson on the opening page of This Is Not a Novel, adding, more than a hundred pages later, “Nonlinear. Discontinuous. Collage-like. An assemblage.”
CIRCLES. Dinner at the round mahogany table that Mother and Father bought in London fifty years ago. Father has read a book about the erosion of ocean beaches on the East Coast. Mother says, “That book never mentions the hurricane of ’38.” She was nineteen that year and in college at Mount Holyoke. “I don’t know how I knew it,” she says, “but I knew there was an eye to the storm, and so I made my way to Safford Hall.” Two minutes later she says, “That book never mentions the hurricane of ’38. I don’t know how I knew it, but I knew there was an eye to the storm, and so I made my way to Safford Hall.” Later she says, “That book never mentions the hurricane of ’38. I don’t know how I knew it, but I knew there was an eye to the storm, and so I made my way to Safford Hall.”
“You’re going in circles,” Father says. They say the CAT scan showed some atrophy of her frontal lobes, but the old material is still there. She is very much her old self. Her verbal tics and defenses remain. “Well, now, Mrs. Pettibone,” she says to herself, staring into the refrigerator before dinner. “We’ll cope.” “We’ll get along.” She is the shell of her old self, calcified language and no organism alive enough to lay down new layers.
Would it be possible to live in such a way as to never acquire habits of mind? When my short-term memory goes, I don’t want to be penned up in the wickerwork of my rote responses. If I start being my old self, no heroic measures, please.
SPEECHLESS. In Chinese myth, Old Lady Mêng sits at the exit from the underworld serving the Broth of Oblivion so that all reincarnated souls come to life having forgotten the spirit world, their former incarnations, and even their speech (although legend has it that occasionally a miracle child is born talking, having avoided Lady Mêng’s broth).
REMEMBER WHO YOU ARE. Says Jorge Luis Borges, “I should say I am greedy for death, that I want to stop waking up every morning, finding: Well, here I am, I have to go back to Borges.
“There’s a word in Spanish. . . . Instead of saying ‘to wake up,’ you say recordarse, that is, to record yourself, to remember yourself. . . . Every morning I get that feeling because I am more or less nonexistent. Then when I wake up, I always feel I’m being let down. Because, well, here I am. Here’s the same old stupid game going on. I have to be somebody. I have to be exactly that somebody.”
AGAINST INSOMNIA. In an essay in the journal Nature, Graeme Mitchison and Francis Crick (one of the men who discovered the shape of DNA) once argued, “We dream in order to forget.” Each of our days is so filled with particularity, we are so swamped with sensory detail, that the mind needs some sort of filtering mechanism to sort out the trivial and retain the essential. Dreaming, Crick argues, serves this function. In fact, without some such process we would all be like the monstrous title character of Borges’s short story “Funes, the Memorious,” who is unable to forget even the smallest details of his day, so that a tree at 3:06 p.m. with the light just so on its leaves stays with him as wholly distinct from the same tree two minutes later shaded by a cloud. Funes “was . . . almost incapable of general, platonic ideas,” Borges’s narrator remarks, for “to think is to forget a difference, to generalize, to abstract.” It is required of us to forget many particular trees before we can know Tree itself. The ancients broadened the stroke, saying that it is required of us to forget entire worlds—the Age of Iron, these eons of hearsay—before we can recall to mind eternal things.
STATE-TRANSITION AMNESIA. The old mythmakers often puzzled over how a person might either preserve memory or induce forgetfulness when moving from one state of being to another, focusing usually on the transition between life and death (entering the underworld / emerging from the womb) but also on crossing the boundaries between different eras (the golden age / the Age of Iron), places (home/away), moods (rage/ equanimity), and levels of consciousness (waking/sleep).
The ancients also showed an interest in the amnesic effects of various drugs and thus of the line between sobriety and intoxication. (In Homer, we hear of nepenthe easing men’s “pains and irritations, making them forget their troubles,” and of the home-forgetting power of the lotus plant; or in China, think of the Broth of Oblivion Old Lady Mêng serves to the child about to be born.)
Nowadays, we might frame the boundary effects of such transitions in terms of “state-dependent memory,” the idea being that memories drop away as we move from one state of being to another but can then be recovered when we move back. In the folklore of memory, the story is typically told of the drunk who hides his car keys while on a bender and can’t remember where he put them until he gets drunk again. Empirical research has never produced such a clear-cut case, but studies done with various drugs—alcohol, amphetamines, barbiturates, marijuana, nicotine, and more—nonetheless show that state-dependent memory is not just folklore.
In one experiment, college students smoked marijuana—half of the joints nicely laced with psychotropic THC and the other half inert—and then studied a dozen sets of words grouped into categories. Under “flowers,” for example, appeared two common names (“pansy” and “rose”) and two less common (“jonquil” and “zinnia”). Days later, the students were tested on how many words they could remember. When the previously stoned students got stoned again, their ability to recall improved by 10 or 15 percent.
So, yes, state-dependent memory exists, although, as the small percentages of such studies indicate, the drug effects are weak and limited.
And no matter the strength of the drug effects, state dependency has a fairly simple explanation: recollection is often tied to context, and drug intoxication is itself a context. Just as a return to the site of an event—either in mind or in fact—will bring back memories, so too will a return to being stoned.
And it is by focusing on changes of context that we’ll find the positive value not so much of memory reclaimed as of the initial forgetting that accompanies the move from one state to another. Memories that endure no matter how our contexts change can be a hindrance, not a boon, if the history they carry forward obscures the new setting rather than illuminating it. In such cases, what one study called “the amnesic effect of state change” allows a welcome attention to the new and unexpected. It would be all to the good if the drunk could school himself in sobriety and never remember where he hid the car keys.
GRANDMA HYDE VERSUS FOUCAULT. “The analysis of descent permits the dissociation of the self,” rather than its unification, writes Michel Foucault. The truth about who you are lies not at the root of the tree but rather out at the tips of the branches, the thousand tips.
In 1937, my grandmother published The Descendents of Andrew Hyde, himself the “sixth in descent from William Hyde of Norwich, Connecticut,” this William Hyde being born in England, probably in 1610, and coming to the colonies in 1633.
Twelve generations separate me from William Hyde. I have two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents. . . . My forebears from 1610 may number 2,048. Grandmother’s book remembers William Hyde but forgets 2,047 other ancestors, including William’s wife.
To practice subversive genealogy means to forget the idealism of a singular forefather and remember these thousands. With that remembrance you must multiply the sense of who you are, multiply it until it disappears. Even Foucault studies the self to forget the self.
GOLD ORPHIC TABLET AND CASE FOUND IN PETELIA, SOUTHERN ITALY
FROM THE MUSEUM OF FORGETTING: THE TWO WATERS. The Petelia tablet is a thin sheet of gold inscribed with lines of somewhat muddled Greek—verses taken from a longer Orphic poem of great antiquity. Discovered in a tomb in southern Italy and dating from the fourth century B.C., this gold sheet was rolled up and placed in a cylinder hung on a chain around the neck of the dead. It contains instructions on how to travel safely through the underworld. These say to the initiate,
In the halls of Hades you will find on the right, by a ghostly cypress tree, a spring where the dead souls descending wash away their lives. Do not even draw close to this spring for it offers the Waters of Forgetfulness.
Farther on you will find the pool of Memory. Over this stand guardians. They will ask with keen mind what is your quest in the gloom of deadly Hades. Tell them the whole truth straight out. Say: “I am the child of Earth and starry Heaven, but of Heaven is my true lineage. I am parched with thirst and perishing: give me quickly chill water flowing from the pool of Memory.”
Assuredly the kings of the underworld take pity on you, and will give you water from the spring; then you, when you have drunk, traverse the holy path which other initiates and bacchants tread in glory. After that you will rule among the other heroes.
THE TEST. The doctor asked Mother to remember three words, two concrete and one abstract: “rose, virtue, shoe.” Ten minutes later, he asked if she remembered them. “Virtue” had slipped away. Father told the story at dinner, repeating the words himself. Mother looked trapped, distressed. She went to bed early in those days, and Father was perplexed. “What did we use to do in the evenings?” he asked.
THE TWO WATERS—AN ORACLE. In his second-century Description of Greece, the historian Pausanias tells us that a certain Trophonios—perhaps a hero, perhaps a god, but in any event a power (the name means “Nourisher of the Mind”)—had an oracle at Labadie. Any man wanting to inquire about the future would descend into Trophonios’s cave having first purified himself for several days, bathing only in the river Herkyna and making sacrifices, especially the sacrifice of a ram whose entrails would reveal whether the inquiry would be graciously received.
On the night of his descent, the petitioner would be taken to the river by two young boys who would wash and anoint him with oil. Priests would then lead him to two fountains standing near each other. From these he would drink the Water of Lethe so as to forget his past and the Water of Mnemosyne so as to recall all he saw during his descent. Dressed in linen, he would then climb a ladder down into the chasm, lie on his back, thrust his legs feetfirst into a hole, the rest of his body being swiftly drawn in like that of a man pulled under by the current of a fast-flowing river.
Later, having learned of the future, he would be swept upward again, his feet darting first out of the same opening. The priests would set him on the Chair of Memory, where, paralyzed with fear and unaware of himself and his surroundings, he would speak what he had seen and heard. Then he would be given over to his relatives, who would care for him until he recovered the ability to laugh.
The two waters of Trophonios’s oracle differ from those of the Petelia tablet and other Orphic poems giving instruction to the dead. In the Orphic case, a choice has to be made: forgetfulness must be avoided, memory alone offering a path out of this world. In the case of this oracle, on the other hand, the two waters appear in a sequence and are complementary, not contradictory. They bespeak the conjoining or the ambiguity of Forgetting/Not-Forgetting, Covering/Discovering, Lethe/Aletheia, each power inseparable from and shadowed by the other. Supplicants do not choose between the two but instead become vessels in which the waters are held in a single solution.
What is the sign or the mark of those who have drunk that blend of Memory and Forgetting? Here it is laughter.
BADMINTON. “One who has perfected himself in the twin arts of remembering and forgetting is in a position to play at battledore and shuttlecock with the whole of existence,” says Søren Kierkegaard.
APOPTOSIS. As the human embryo develops, its organs are shaped by a process known as “programmed cell death.” Two flipper-like appendages turn into hands as the cells between the fingers die off, separating the digits. Sometimes the cells just fall away, and at other times they are devoured by other cells, there being at least two forms of natural cell death—autophagy, or self-eating, and apoptosis, from the Greek for the “dropping off” of petals from flowers or leaves from trees. Both of these must be distinguished from the cell death that results from traumatic wounds, disease, or old age. Trauma simply damages the body, whereas programmed cell death carves useful organs and tissues out of otherwise undifferentiated flesh. It is a shaping force, an aesthetic force.
Normal forgetting is the programmed cell death of mental life. It winnows the day. It shapes experience into a useful story.
MÍMIR’S SKULL. All-Father Odin, leaving one of his eyes as a pledge, acquired his ancestral knowledge and runic wisdom by drinking the waters that bubble up in Mímir’s spring at one of the roots of the World Tree, the great ash Yggdrasil. The giant Mímir (the name means “memory”) guards that spring, and he too “is full of ancient lore” for having drunk its waters. Some of the Norse stories have it that Mímir was decapitated in a battle with the Vanir but that Odin kept the head alive with herbs and magic spells and, as with the severed head of Orpheus singing still in a cave at Lesbos, this head went on sharing its secrets whenever Odin was in need. Says the seeress in the Völuspá, “Odin murmured with Mímir’s head” as Ragnarok—the doom of the gods—drew near.
Some have suggested that what is found in Mímir’s spring is not only water but also the giant’s severed head or, rather, his skull, there being Celtic and Germanic traditions in which skulls placed in wells give curative and prophetic power, especially if the skull itself is used as the drinking vessel (as one once was by the poet Byron, who, discovering on his estate the bones of “some jolly friar,” had the skull mounted as a cup for wine—“the drink of Gods”—so as to “rhyme and revel with the dead” in imitation “of the Goths of old”).
WATERS BUBBLE UP. Bruce Lincoln, a historian of religions at Chicago, once gathered a range of Indo-European myths and tried to reconstruct from them a single proto-Indo-European myth about what happens to the souls of the dead as they travel through the underworld. His essay “Waters of Memory,
Waters of Forgetfulness” lays out this proto-myth; in it, the dead must first drink from a spring or cross a river or lake whose waters wash away all their memories. Their memories are not lost, however: dissolved in the water, they are carried to a spring where they bubble up to be drunk by certain individuals—bards, prophets, seers—who become infused with wisdom, knowing, as it were, the collective experience of all who came before.
In the Greek case, the river Lethe carries the waters of forgetfulness; in the Orphic tradition, they are found in a spring marked by a white cypress “to the left of the house of Hades.” In the Upanishads, the early Vedic texts from India, the dead come to the river Vijara—“Apart for Old Age”—and cross it “by mind,” shaking off their past deeds both good and bad. In the Norse stories, the waters of forgetfulness plausibly belong to the river Gjöll, which flows “next to the gates of Hel,” the realm of all the dead but for the battle-slain.
For an example of where this water might emerge, Lincoln turns to Mímir’s spring, for it was there, by drinking the waters of memory, that All-Father Odin acquired his wisdom.
TWO CATEGORIES. A lively imagination requires a balance of memory and forgetting. “You should go in for a blending of the two elements, memory and oblivion,” says Jorge Luis Borges, “and we call that imagination.” Because Mnemosyne is the mother of the Muses, all arts require her double power, her ability to record or erase as the need may be. There are then two ways for memory to destroy imagination: by retaining too many abstractions (thus failing to perceive fresh detail) and by retaining too many details (thus failing to perceive abstractions, as with Borges’s Funes). The point is worth repeating because two beneficial categories of forgetting recur throughout these notebooks: in one, a mind has become too attached to its concepts or thought-habits and needs to drop them so as to attend again to detail; in the other, a surfeit of detail clogs the flow of thought and must be winnowed so as to reveal the larger shapes of concept and abstraction.
NO FAMILY, NO MOTHER. Roland Barthes, looking at photographs, made a rule for himself so as to avoid the first of the two ways that memory might deaden imagination: he tried never to reduce himself to the “disincarnated, disaffected” kinship categories popular in the social sciences. “This principle obligated me to ‘forget’ two institutions: the Family, the Mother.”
Barthes made himself drop such categories so as to preserve the particularity of his mother, who had recently died and whom he was trying to call to mind by looking at photographs. Most of the images he found failed to bring her back. “I never recognized her except in fragments”—a part of her face, the way she held her hands—“which is to say that I missed her being.”
Yet finally he found an image that was “indeed essential,” that achieved, “utopically, the impossible science of the unique being.” “The photograph was very old. The corners were blunted from having been pasted into an album, the sepia print had faded, and the picture just managed to show two children standing together at the end of a little wooden bridge in a glassed-in conservatory. . . . My mother was five at the time.”
In the book in which he tells this story, Camera Lucida, Barthes illustrates his argument with many images, but he never reproduces this essential photograph. “It exists only for me.” Others might see in it the late nineteenth century—its clothing, its architecture—they might even see “the Family, the Mother,” but none would see the unique being, the one that mattered to Roland Barthes.
Sometimes a considered forgetting is the first step toward bringing the memory of the dead to life.
The real constitution of each thing is accustomed to hide itself.
—HERACLITUS, FRAG. 123
FORGOTTEN IS ALSO TRUE. How odd that the Greek word now translated as “truth” is a negative—a-lethe, the not-forgotten, the un-concealed—the implication being that the ground condition of the world (or of the mind) is obscurity and mystery and that persons who speak the truth have done the work of (or been given a gift for) un-hiding, calling to mind what is otherwise veiled, covered, dark, silent.
Marcel Detienne’s Masters of Truth in Archaic Greece lists three persons thought capable of such work in the archaic age: the poet, the prophet, and the just king. These were the vessels through whom a power called Aletheia spoke. The knowledge she offered was “a form of divinatory omniscience”; she gave the poet “the power to ‘decipher the invisible,’” to recall not the past exactly but the atemporal suchness of things, their otherwise obscure being.
And although this divine power may overcome or negate obscurity and mystery, by Detienne’s reading she is not split or separated from those ground conditions: “Aletheia and Lethe are not exclusive or contradictory . . . ; they constitute two extremes of a single religious power.”
In archaic Greece, these twin forces belonged to a set of related dualities, Aletheia aligned with memory, justice, sung speech, light, and praise, and Lethe aligned with oblivion, hiddenness, silence, darkness, and blame. Aletheia “was not the opposite of lies or falsehoods”; she was the opposite of all these other things, or rather she is one portion of an ambiguous force that can enlighten or darken, can lead to speech or silence, praise or blame. The Muses are agents not just of memory but of memory-forgetting (as in Hesiod, where their song brings both memory and “the forgetting of ills,” or in the Iliad, where they punish a boastful Thracian singer by making him “forget his artful playing”).
Let us then reclaim forgetting as a component of truth, there being “no Aletheia without a measure of Lethe.” When a diviner or poet penetrates the invisible world, Memory and Oblivion both are present. And what is the name of this double thing found at the seam of silence and speech, praise and blame, light and darkness? Call it imagination, call it poetry.
THE BIRTH OF A MEMORY ART. Cicero’s book on oratory recounts the origin story of the Memory Palace tradition, the one in which an orator commits to memory the elements of his speech by mentally placing an image for each of his points in a sequence of locations, as if in the rooms of a palace. Cicero has a certain Antonius express his gratitude “to the famous Simonides of Ceos, who is said to have first invented the science of mnemonics,” and then has Antonius tell the story:
Simonides was dining at the house of a wealthy nobleman named Scopas . . . , and chanted a lyric poem which he had composed in honour of his host, in which he followed the custom of the poets by including for decorative purposes a long passage referring to Castor and Pollux; whereupon Scopas with excessive meanness told him he would pay him half the fee agreed on for the poem. . . . The story runs that a little later a message was brought to Simonides to go outside, as two young men were standing at the door who earnestly requested him to come out; so he rose from his seat and went out, and could not see anybody.
It seems that the young men were in fact Castor and Pollux, grateful for being noted in Simonides’s poem and protecting him from a punishment about to be inflicted on the stingy patron:
In the interval of his absence the roof of the hall where Scopas was giving the banquet fell in, crushing Scopas himself and his relations underneath the ruins and killing them; and when their friends wanted to bury them but were altogether unable to know them apart as they had been completely crushed, the story goes that Simonides was enabled by his recollection of the place in which each of them had been reclining at table to identify them for separate interment; and that this circumstance suggested to him the discovery of the truth that the best aid to clearness of memory consists in orderly arrangement. He inferred that persons desiring to train this faculty must select localities and form mental images of the facts they wish to remember and store those images in the localities.
TESTES. A second Latin book on rhetoric, the Ad Herennium, gives instructions for forming Cicero’s “mental images.” Above all we’re told to make them dramatic. Don’t just imagine your friend’s face; imagine the face smeared with blood. “Ordinary things easily slip from the memory while the striking and novel stay longer.”
Sometimes “one entire matter” can be recorded by composing a single such striking image, the example given being that of a lawyer called to defend a man charged with poisoning another in order to gain an inheritance, a crime committed despite the presence of many witnesses. To remember this case, the lawyer is advised to form an image of the murdered man lying in bed with the defendant at his bedside holding a cup in his right hand, tablets in his left, and, hanging from the fourth finger of that hand, a ram’s testicles.
How to decode that image? Apparently, the cup is there to recall the poison, the tablets to indicate the inheritance, and those ram’s testicles, well, maybe testiculos is meant to suggest testes, witnesses, or perhaps—because ram scrota were used to make purses—the image suggests money used to bribe the witnesses.
Whatever the case, out of such curious and crazy seeds eventually grew the arts of memory that were to dominate European rhetoric and religious speculation for centuries to come.
DRAWN DOWN INTO TIME. While these stories out of Latin rhetoric are of interest in their own right, I offer them in the context of Marcel Detienne’s sketch of the archaic Lethe-Aletheia mythology, for it is Detienne’s argument that in the history of memory and forgetting it was especially the sixth-century Simonides of Ceos who took those twinned powers away from their archaic masters—the bard, the diviner, and the just king—and gave them over to the sophists and rhetoricians, practitioners of persuasion and illusion. In Cicero’s account, notice that Simonides is a hired hand, writing for a fee, and that as such, he is the literary equivalent of a court painter, his employer being a wealthy aristocrat. “By the classical period,” writes Detienne, “the system of thought that privileged sung speech as a religious power had become no more than an anachronism. . . . The poet’s job now was to exalt the nobility and praise the rich landowners.” With Simonides, “memory became a secularized technique” and forgetting consequently a failure of technique, a mental deficit rather than a shaping power working in tandem with its twin.
Whereas in the archaic age these powers belonged to certain special persons, in the classical age they are available to any student of “the science of mnemonics.” Whereas previously the poet spoke without artifice (“speaking Aletheia came as naturally as breathing”), now there are schools of rhetoric. Whereas previously the voice had been singular and efficacious, atemporal and commanding, now it is but one among many and bent not on assertion but on persuasion. Where previously the goal was a release from human time, now time became “the best of things,” Simonides said, because “it is in time that one learns and memorizes.” Where in the archaic age the sequential waters of memory and forgetfulness organized the petitioner’s quest for prophetic knowledge, in the classical age a set of memory tricks helps an absentminded lawyer remember that his client is accused of murder.
BOREDOM. Writing about the cosmology of the Trobriand islanders, the anthropologist Susan Montague tells us that the Trobriand universe is a vast disembodied space filled with both minds and energy. Cosmic minds are all-seeing, all-knowing, and all-powerful, able to manipulate the energy of the universe toward whatever end they desire.
But in spite of, or rather because of, these remarkable endowments, cosmic minds have a problem: cosmic boredom. They have the power to do anything they wish, but because they have no needs, that power has no purpose. They may be all-knowing, but to be all-knowing means there’s nothing to think about. So they sit around bored to death or, rather, bored to life, because as it happens, they have invented a way to relieve cosmic boredom: it is to play the amusing game of life.
To play, you must be born into a human body, and to be born as such, you must forget the fullness of what you knew and work only with what can be known through the body. A human being is someone who has abandoned the boring surfeit of knowledge so as to come alive.
LIQUIDATION. Working to heal herself of the trauma of rape, Sohaila Abdulali took it upon herself to counsel young women, teaching them about rape’s dangers and effects. At first she found it upsetting to include her own story in these classes, but after many tellings the intensity of feeling faded. She even surprised herself during one class. Someone asked her what was the worst thing about her experience: “Suddenly I looked at them all and said, the thing I hate the most about it is that it’s boring.” Time had passed, the work had been done, and she wasn’t interested anymore. The French psychologist Pierre Janet once suggested that we think of memory not as a thing fixed in the mind but as an action, “the action of telling a story,” and when it is successful, that action leads to “the stage of liquidation.” Forgetting appears when the story has been so fully told as to wear itself out. Then time begins to flow again; then the future can unfold.
TWO BURIALS. Given that the etymological root of the Greek lethe suggests that forgetting is the covering up or hiding of something, we could extend the image and say that to forget is to bury. And to differentiate some kinds of forgetting—especially in regard to trauma, both individual and collective—let us say that there are two kinds of burials: in one, something is hidden because we can’t stand to look at it; in the other, it is buried because we are done with it. It has been revealed and examined, and now it may be covered up or dropped for good. This latter is proper burial, burial after attention has been paid and funeral rites observed.
SORTING THE DEAD. Those who never receive proper burial are denied the relief of state-transition amnesia, their memories sticking to them even in death. In Virgil’s Aeneid, Aeneas travels to the underworld in search of his father. Coming to the rivers where Charon ferries the dead to the otherworld, he sees that the ferryman is refusing passage to some of the thronging souls. “What divides the dead?” he asks the Sibyl, his guide; she replies that those denied passage are the “helpless and graveless.” Charon will not carry them across the waters “until their bones have found a resting place. A hundred years they roam and flit about these shores; then only are they admitted and revisit the longed-for pools.”
IN FIJI, according to Basil Thomson, the souls of the dead, after various adventures, come to a spring and drink to forget sorrow. Why, exactly? Because the relatives of the dead in the daylight world are tired of mourning and “savage etiquette” prescribes that as long as the dead soul remembers, his relations must remember too. They find this tedious, so the shades drink the Water of Solace and the living are released.
IN ANNE MICHAELS’S NOVEL Fugitive Pieces, the parents and sister of the young Holocaust survivor Jakob Beer have been killed, but he remembers them in dreams. When he wakes, he feels a particular anguish: “the possibility that it was as painful for them to be remembered as it was for me to remember them; that I was haunting my parents and Bella with my calling, startling them awake in their black beds.”
“LET GO.” In a long 2017 Facebook post, the Diné, or Navajo, activist, artist, and ceremonial leader Pat McCabe—also known as Woman Stands Shining—explained her resistance to the call to “never forget.”
McCabe had once worked with a shamanic healer to address her serial depressions. During one session, she had a vision of living in Canyon de Chelly on Navajo tribal lands and witnessing a massacre of her people at the hands of “beings who had the appearance of humans, who were all identically dressed in blue.” Over the years, her vision kept returning until she finally sought out a place where the events might have in fact occurred—a place aptly named Massacre Cave. There she unexpectedly found herself praying.
“I began to address my ancestors. . . . I said to them, that we would love them always, and forever, but that somehow we must forget, or let go of, all of the violence that had come before now, or we ourselves would complete the job of genocide that the U.S. government began. I begged them, my ancestors, to let us go free. I told them they must find their way all the way home to the Spirit World.
“And then I prayed with all my heart, and all my tears, and asked for Creator to open the gate for them to travel, and to leave us in peace, and for them to find peace beyond the gate, and for each of us to travel in the correct way once again, each in our own world, me in this Earth Walk world and they, true ancestors in the Spirit World. I saw part of this take place, I saw them traveling in long lines out of this place and into the world beyond.”
“TEACH ME I AM FORGOTTEN by the dead / And that the dead is by herself forgot,” wrote Emerson at the age of twenty-seven, his young wife, Ellen, having died.
In his biography of Emerson, Robert D. Richardson points out that this prayer came at a turning point in Emerson’s life. He soon left his Concord home and traveled to Europe. He wanted to live again, and to do so, the boundary that separates the living from the dead must be sealed. In a case like this, “never forget” would be a deadly curse.
BLOOD AT THE ROOT. There’s something odd worth noting in Cicero’s account of the invention of artificial memory. Remember: the poet Simonides was insulted at a banquet; called away, he briefly left the banquet hall; while he was out, the roof collapsed, crushing the host and all his relations, mangling their bodies so completely that none of the corpses could be identified except by the returning poet. Simonides could recall where each guest was sitting and thus discovered, wrote Cicero, that anyone wishing to train the memory “must select localities and form mental images of the facts they wish to remember.”
What’s strange about this story going forward—for it is the beginning of a centuries-long interest in the place system of memory—is how much is made of the method and how little of those unrecognizable, oozing slabs of human flesh and bone. The “completely crushed” bodies add a memory-enhancing hook of horror to the otherwise benign localities and images.
In the rhetorical tradition, the tree of memory set its roots in blood.
AN ALTAR TO OBLIVION. If the arts of memory are rooted in blood, could there be an art of forgetting that puts an end to bloodshed?
In the Erechtheum on the Acropolis in Athens, there once stood, says Plutarch, an altar to Lethe, to Forgetfulness, meant to remind Athenians to forget a mythic dispute between Poseidon and Athena. Each god had sought to win the city’s favor with a gift, Poseidon offering a spring of salty water and Athena, the winner, an olive tree. Defeated, Poseidon did not begrudge the loss, however, but took it, says Plutarch, with “an easy-going absence of resentment.” The dispute between Poseidon and Athena supposedly took place on the second day of the last month of summer (Boëdromion), and Athenians have ever since omitted that day from their calendar. The erased date and the altar to Forgetfulness are reminders that the foundational divine discord should be left to the past, not brought forward.
ENDLESS. Perhaps all nations have their foundational discord. In the United States, it was the debate over slavery, not solved by the compromises written into the Constitution and not solved by the War Between the States. Terry Alford, author of a 2015 biography of Abraham Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth, reports that even as he was working on his book—a century and a half after the event—a custom had arisen in which people put Lincoln pennies faceup on the Booth family crypt in Baltimore, as if to seal the assassin in his grave. But others had reversed the ritual, leaving pennies with Lincoln’s face down in the alley behind Ford’s Theatre, the site of the assassination. “That Civil War,” Mr. Alford said, “is still going on.”
MIXING MYTH AND HISTORY. The Athenians omit the second day of Boëdromion from their calendar so as to remember to forget the founding discord between Poseidon and Athena. In noting this, Plutarch observed that Poseidon exceeded Thrasybulus in civic spirit, for the god agreed to bear no grudge in his hour of defeat, whereas Thrasybulus’s similar graciousness appeared only after a famous victory in a battle against tyranny.
THE TYRANNY. At the end of the Peloponnesian War, the citizens of Athens, thoroughly beaten and starving, surrendered to Sparta, whereupon the Spartans appointed thirty Athenians of oligarchic leanings to write a new constitution. But, as Xenophon tells us, the Athenians “continually delayed framing and publishing this constitution” and instead initiated a civil war against the city’s democrats and resident aliens.
Beginning in September of 404 B.C., the Thirty Tyrants, as they are now called, arrested and put to death all who had previously offended them or who now aroused their enmity. They encouraged collaborating citizens to inform on their neighbors, thereby sending them to death. They disarmed their enemies and seized their lands and property; they killed resident aliens, then sold their goods to pay a mercenary militia; they occupied the village of Eleusis and, to make it a refuge for themselves alone, executed all male inhabitants. When one of their own questioned the excesses of this reign of terror, they passed him the bowl of hemlock. By the end, thousands had been driven into exile and fifteen hundred killed, more than during any decade of the war just passed.
As might be expected, resistance to the Thirty Tyrants soon arose, and in May of 403, in a final battle at the Piraeus, Thrasybulus and his fellow democrats defeated the oligarchy.
As that battle drew to a close, Cleocritus of the democratic resistance called for reconciliation with his fellow Athenians. “Citizens . . . , why do you want to kill us . . . ? We have joined with you in the holiest rituals, in the most beautiful sacrifices and festivals. We have been fellow dancers with you, fellow students, and fellow soldiers. . . . For the sake of our kinship, our marriage ties, and our fellowship . . . , put a stop to this crime against our city.”
THE DEATH OF POLEMARCHUS. Lysias, one of the great Attic orators and a resident alien in Athens at the time of the tyranny, tells the story of how Eratosthenes, one of the Thirty, came upon Lysias’s brother Polemarchus in the street, arrested him without charge, and carried him off to prison. The Thirty sent down their customary order, that Polemarchus was to drink the hemlock. They allowed him no hearing, gave him no chance at self-defense, would not tell him why he was to die. After his family carried his body from prison, the Thirty forbade them to hold his funeral rites in their own homes, and so they laid Polemarchus out in a hired shed. Though they were rich in cloaks, the Thirty made them wrap Polemarchus in a borrowed shroud and rest his head on a borrowed pillow. The Thirty confiscated his property—slaves, gold and silver, ornaments and bronze, furniture and clothing. When Melobius, another of the Thirty, came into the house, he immediately tore from the ears of Polemarchus’s wife her earrings made of gold.
Multiply such thieving and such murder by fifteen hundred dead and again by thousands exiled, and you will have an estimate of the grief and rage endemic to Athens on the day the tyrants fell, of how hard it might have been to heed Cleocritus’s call for reconciliation.
THE UNFORGETTABLE. Some emotions grip us, then fall away. A great happiness can bring sleepless nights when first it blooms, but the possession eventually fades. Two years out, no one says, “I cannot shake my joy!”
Grief and rage, however—these can go on and on. Decades go by and still a loss or wound from childhood colors our days. Two decades have passed since Odysseus left for war, and still the old swineherd Eumaeus grieves “unforgettingly” for his absent master.
Rage may be the more troubling of the unforgettables, and especially rage knit together with grief because these don’t just persist; they call for action, and in action taken, they reseed themselves generation after generation. All the years of the Trojan War have passed, and still Clytemnestra cannot forget how Agamemnon sacrificed their daughter to put a wind in his sails, and so she takes her revenge, a revenge that plants the seed in turn for their children, Orestes and Electra, to seek vengeance against her.
In Sophocles’s play that bears her name, Electra speaks of her father’s murder as a sorrow (or evil) that cannot be forgotten and describes her own passion (or anger) in similar terms, though in this case the Greek for “not forgetting” (our láthei) might better be translated from its root meaning—“it does not escape notice,” “it is not hidden.” The image is of anger as a thing that the mind cannot bury, cannot help being aware of. Electra’s passion won’t let her alone. It’s intrusive. It bugs her. We do not control the unforgettable; it controls us.
The spirits of such unforgetting are called the Furies, the Erinyes. They cling to the memory of hurt and harm, injury and insult. Their names are Grievance, Ceaseless, and Bloodlust. Their names are Grudge, Relentless, and Payback. They bloat the present with the undigested past. “Most dreaded of the forces of insomnia,” they harry the mind, demanding for its release a ransom paid in blood.
THE TERMS OF PEACE. At the end of the Athenian civil war, after the democrats had defeated the oligarchs, negotiations led to what Aristotle in The Athenian Constitution calls “peace and reconciliation.” By the terms of the agreement, the Thirty and several small groups of their supporters were exiled to nearby Eleusis (and could be subject to criminal prosecution if they returned). All others, no matter their involvement in the tyranny, were granted amnesty. They were allowed to stay in Athens provided that each took an oath, swearing “not to remember the recent misfortunes.”
The oath is the crux of the Athenian amnesty and, before we unpack its complexity, it should be said that, by all accounts, it worked; it put an end to the fighting and to any ongoing cycle of revenge killings. “On this occasion,” writes Aristotle, “the Athenians reacted to their previous misfortunes . . . better and more public-spiritedly than anyone else at any other time.”
FORGET ABOUT IT. A family has saved for a trip to Carthage, only to find that all the money must go to pay a tax bill. Says the wife to the husband, “We can forget about Carthage.”
A teenager has misbehaved and his parents say, “You can forget about using the car tonight.”
When we say, “Don’t forget the milk,” we indicate an act that should follow from the thought. It wouldn’t do to say, “I was thinking about milk the whole time; I just didn’t buy it.”
In one of his endless meditations on language, Ludwig Wittgenstein writes, “Suppose someone points to a vase and says ‘Look at that marvelous blue—forget about the shape.’ Or: ‘Look at the marvelous shape—forget about the color.’ No doubt you’ll do something different in each case.”
One category of forgetfulness has to do with putting a thought aside, as it were, and with the nonaction that follows. “To forget about the shape” of the vase means to refrain from putting it in play, mentally, and thus not to make it part of whatever “you’ll do.” “Forget about Carthage” doesn’t mean you can’t think about it, just that thinking about it can’t lead to a trip.
In all such cases, forgetting is a lack of action, not a lack of thought. You can think about driving the car all you want, but you won’t be driving it tonight. Forgetting in these cases severs the otherwise reflexive link between thought and action. Many things may come to mind, but when they do, nothing happens. The seeds of karma are not sown.
THE OATH. The key phrase in the Athenian amnesty oath is variously translated as “it is forbidden to recall the recent misfortunes” or to “recall the past misdeeds” or to “harbor grievances against any citizen.” The Greek phrase itself is mê mnêsikakein (μὴ μνησικακεῖν), mê being “not,” and mnêsikakein being a compound built from mnes-, indicating memory, and kakein from kaka, indicating any bad or evil thing. As Nicole Loraux argues, the “bringing back to memory” that the oath forbids is not simple recollection but rather a summoning of memory against an opponent: “Mnêsikakein implies that one wields a memory like a weapon, that one attacks or punishes someone, in short, that one seeks revenge.”
The language echoes the old tradition of blood vengeance. In the Oresteia, for example, the Furies describe themselves as those who “hold the memory of evil (mnemonics kakôn),” the point being that the amnesty oath is an inversion of that epithet and, as such, should be seen as a speech act directed against everything the Furies represent, the primordial forces of unforgettable grief and rage.
That being the case, the negation the oath declares is a bit of an oxymoron for, given what we know about the Furies, we might now translate it as a promise “to forget the unforgettable”—a contradiction in terms unless, that is, we add the distinction just made between symbolic action (thought, speech, writing) and actual action (for example, acts of revenge). Athenians swore to forget about “recent misfortunes” in terms of action, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t speak or write about them.
In fact, as the legal scholar Adriaan Lanni has pointed out, the amnesty was quite leaky when it came to the actual airing of grievances, especially in court cases about matters wholly unrelated to the civil war. Athenian courts had neither judges as such nor lawyers, cases being heard by randomly selected juries of several hundred adult male citizens. In addressing the jury, litigants were allowed to bring up all sorts of evidence that we would now think of as irrelevant or prejudicial: how the accused treated his parents, for example, or—to the point here—how he had behaved during the tyranny. Amnesty did not mean amnesia or silence; gossip and shaming proceeded heartily outside the prohibition on litigation directly related to civil war crimes. The amnesty worked in part because there was a way for grief and anger to be spoken even as everyone swore to forget about actual action. Speech was the charm deployed against the incarnate violence of the unforgettable.
“ACTS OF OBLIVION” was the name given in later centuries to grants of amnesty such as, for example, the 1560 Treaty of Edinburgh, signed after Reformation hostilities in Scotland (“All things done here against the laws shall be discharged, and a law of oblivion shall be established”) or the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia signed at the close of the Thirty Years’ War (“There shall be . . . a perpetual Oblivion . . . of all that has been committed since the beginning of these Troubles.” All “shall be bury’d in eternal Oblivion”).
Sometimes those who would not forget “the recent misfortunes” were threatened with punishment. Upon the restoration of Charles II to the throne, the 1660 Act of Oblivion levied fines upon anyone who, for the next few years, “presume[d] maliciously,” in speech or in writing, “to revive the Memory of the late Differences.” Things were even tougher in the British colonies. After Protestants rebelled against Maryland’s Catholic proprietor, the 1650 Act of Oblivion singled out all whose “reviling speeches” might disturb “the Amity desired” and threatened them with “any one or more of these”: imprisonment, fines, banishment, pillory, and whipping.
THE PHILTRUM. In Jewish legend, the Angel of the Night, Laïlah, places the fertilized soul of a child in the womb and, kindling a light so the soul can see the world from end to end, teaches it about the just and the wicked, those who follow the Torah and God’s commandments and those who do not. When it comes time to be born, the angel lightly strokes the child’s upper lip, leaving a small indentation. Immediately, the newborn forgets all it has seen and learned and comes into the world crying.
BABBLE. The prattle of babies displays an amazing range. The linguist Roman Jakobson writes that the babbling infant voices phonemes “which are never found within a single language or even a group of languages—consonants of any place of articulation, palatalized and rounded consonants, sibilants, affricates, clicks, complex vowels, diphthongs, etc.” During their age of “tongue delirium,” infants are capable of uttering “all conceivable sounds.”
Then comes the fall into language, the “passing over . . . to the first acquisition of words.” In order for there to be intelligible speech, there must be “stable phonemes . . . capable of becoming impressed on the memory.” All the rest of the polyphonic natal tongue must not be so impressed, must be dropped. The forgetting that is birth does not end the day the baby is born, but continues until the inborn font of phonemes has been sluiced into the narrow flow of local speech.
FOLDING LAUNDRY ON THE PLAINS OF LETHE. The retirement community had an arrangement with a day care facility where Father could leave Mother so that he could have some time to himself.
One of the facility’s tricks for engaging the demented was to set them to work folding laundry. Mother stood at a table with a large basket of dry wash before her, folding the sheets, folding the towels.
“WATERS NO VESSEL CAN CONTAIN.” Much of the mythological material offered so far presents memory and forgetting together, sometimes as twinned or equal powers, though more often with memory placed above forgetting as the thing to be valued and sought. Moreover, by “memory,” the old stories don’t mean what we mean today. Mythological memory refers not to mundane recollection (what happened yesterday or last year) but to the mind’s awareness of eternal truths. In Hesiod, memory brings the golden age to mind; in Plato, memory recalls the ideal forms; even with the mixed waters of Trophonios’s oracle, it is the Waters of Memory that help the petitioner to keep in mind the oracle’s prophetic insight. Often, then, forgetting is a falling away from the ideal, a falling into birth and into time.
And yet, if we are seeking out those situations in which forgetting is more useful than remembering, it’s worth flagging places where the old stories themselves suggest that troubles follow if memory triumphs at the expense of forgetting. Nothing good happens when unforgettable Furies make revenge the ideal you can’t get out of your head. Or when memories of injury stoke an endless civil war. Or when the dead never drink the Water of Solace and the living know no end to grief. Or when, as with Borges’s sleepless Funes, no detail of daily life is too trivial to let go of. By implication, if forgetting is a fall into birth and time, then a pure, triumphant memory will mean an end to emerging life and a fixing of time, everything stuck just where it is (stuck, we might say, in those eternal, unchanging forms).
As much as memory is to be valued and sought, there is clearly some limit. Only some right relationship between the two powers can assure constant rebirth and the liquefaction of time. True, when time flows, we are in the world of sickness, old age, and death, but we are also in the world of fertility, new life, and fresh action, and it is these that call for an allowed forgetting. In Plato’s myth of Er, the man returned from the dead says that souls soon to be born must drink from the river Lethe, “whose waters no vessel can contain.” What exactly are those waters? Perhaps they are life itself, for life is a thing no vessel can contain. Every body it inhabits will in time be broken. These are one and the same, the waters of life and the waters of forgetfulness. To be born is to be stripped of all atemporal knowledge and left henceforth to know this world through that time-bound mortal vessel, the human body.
THE UNDERWORLD NOW. In a modern, secular world, how are we to understand those old stories about the landscape through which the souls of the dead must travel? Suppose we do not believe that the soul survives the body, that it makes a journey, that it will be born again? Are all the old tales empty, then, disposable? Or can we bring them forward, translated into a current tongue?
One way might be to say that the forgetting that belongs to state-transition amnesia, as I’ve called it, is suffered not by the newly dead but by the newly bereaved who struggle to hold the dead in mind, only to find their memories eroded as they cross into that new state of being known as mourning. Slowly the tide of tears thins the substance of the past.
Another way might be to say that the old stories are not about life after death but about life after sleep. Every night we travel through the underworld, and in the morning we will have to see what has been discarded and what preserved from the day just passed, which dreams are remembered and which forgotten, and what training there is for those who wish to take the path of artful sorting, forgetting, and remembering in a useful way.
Or perhaps a night-and-day cycle is too long. Let us say that the self is reborn with every breath we take, that it is constantly dropping away and coming into being as conditions alter. Every human thirst draws us toward the waters of forgetfulness and the waters of memory, and the old stories tell us that there is schooling as to how to quench our thirst such that the voice might speak with bardic authority. Between every in-breath and every out-breath, there is the underworld with its various waters. The ghostly cypress that the Orphic poets sang about is not in the future. It is right in front of you.
