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NOTE BOOK II

SELF

“A Perfectly Useless Concentration”

THE APHORISMS

Changes of identity call for large doses of forgetfulness.

“The Atlantic is a Lethean stream.”

Nothing can be forgotten that was not first in mind.

“One tock! and I have forgotten all I knew.”

“Make the grass grassy and the stone stony.”

“Mnemosyne is a very careless girl.”

You may visit a grave but you do not have to.

Live steeped in history but not in the past.

Liquefy the fixed idea.

“We drink light.”

THE EMPTY STUDIO. Said John Cage to the painter Philip Guston, “When you start working, everybody is in your studio—the past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and above all, you own ideas—all are there. But as you continue painting, they start leaving, one by one, and you are left completely alone. Then, if you’re lucky, even you leave.”

THE DARWIN LETTER. “Reading Darwin, one admires the beautiful solid case being built up out of his heroic observations, almost unconscious or automatic—and then comes a sudden relaxation, a forgetful phase, and one feels the strangeness of his undertaking, sees the lonely young man, his eyes fixed on facts and minute details, sinking or sliding giddily off into the unknown.

“What one seems to want in art, in experiencing it, is the same thing that is necessary for its creation, a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration,” says Elizabeth Bishop.

THE PLAIN BUN. I am about seven years old, and I have read a book containing the moral that it is better, when offered a choice of things, not to take the very best but to take something modest. I am in a bakeshop with Mrs. Brown, who offers to buy me any bun I want. There are hot cross buns with white frosting and buns studded with candied fruits, but I choose a very plain bun, much to Mrs. Brown’s surprise (and, as I eat it, to my own disappointment).

I am about ten years old. I am standing in the kitchen after school, and my mother—by the sink, in sunlight—suddenly asks me if I think she should get her hair cut. I have no opinion whatsoever on this matter, but I can tell that she wants to get her hair cut, and so I tell her that, yes, she should.

But why do I remember these events? Because in them I am performing someone else’s script. When I perform myself, that’s forgettable, and rightly so, the actions of the unself-conscious self leaving no necessary mark on memory.

RESISTANCE. In a dream, I have forgotten to write my term paper. I am in a seminar led by the famous professor C——, and I suddenly realize that it is the end of the semester and I have done absolutely nothing about the paper. I wake in the usual panic.

Reflecting on the dream of forgetting, I decide to honor the forgetful me. There must be a good reason he has not written that paper. He seems trapped under false obligation—able neither to do the task nor to deny it.

I myself am now teaching a college class. The semester is beginning as I have this dream, and now I feel sympathy for my students. Years from now, will I appear in their dreams, expecting the unfinished work? I revise my syllabus, removing three of the assignments.

A SHORT HISTORY OF HABIT. For centuries, the cultivation of habit was considered a virtue. “Habit is . . . the enormous flywheel of society,” wrote William James, approving of its stabilizing force. “It is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again.”

Not so, said Walter Pater, arguing instead for constant unique alertness, free action as opposed to automatism. And not so, said Henri Bergson, arguing that habit doesn’t produce ethical conduct, only its appearance, a steadiness not enabling but enslaving.

Whatever the reason (perhaps resistance to all that set plaster called to serve industrial production), this virtue flips over at the end of the nineteenth century, whereupon the forgetting of habits of mind becomes the thing to be desired and an inability to forget the sign of mental illness, as in Proust, circa 1910, wherein “certain victims of neurasthenia . . . present year after year the unchanging spectacle of the bizarre habits they believe, each time, they are about to shake off and which they retain forever . . . , caught in the machinery of their maladies.”

FRANCIS PICABIA, M’AMENEZ-Y (1919–20); OIL ON PAPERBOARD, 50" × 35"

FROM THE MUSEUM OF FORGETTING. The command at the center of this painting, “M’amenez-y,” translates as “Take me there,” but if spoken aloud, it also suggests “mon amnésie,” “my amnesia,” and so lays claim to the don d’oubli total attributed to Picabia by his friend Marcel Duchamp: “Francis had . . . a gift of total forgetting which enabled him to launch into new paintings without being influenced by the memory of preceding ones.” The work’s geometrical design is taken from a 1919 science magazine rendering of a new type of boat rudder. In employing such found-object patterns and punning inscriptions, Picabia signals his desire to be released from his own and his culture’s received ideas as to beauty, sense, and subject. A Dada manifesto that appeared in 1920 carried the signature of “Francis Picabia who knows nothing, nothing, nothing.” M’amenez-y is itself a manifesto: it declares the artistic goal of having nothing in mind when the work begins.

TRIBAL SCARS. Odysseus is in disguise when he returns to his home in Ithaca, his true identity realized only by his old nurse, who, washing the stranger’s feet, comes across a scar on his leg, the mark of a wound inflicted by a hunted boar many years earlier. The old nurse takes Odysseus’s leg in her hands to wash it, sees the scar, knows what it is, and drops the leg in surprise, Homer wonderfully inserting between the recognition and the leg drop the full story of how the scar was acquired, how the young Odysseus once went hunting with his grandfather.

When my brother went off to prep school, he was assigned a roommate from Uganda, a boy whose cheeks bore three long parallel scars, tribal scars, the marks of his people. “Trauma” in its simplest sense means “wound,” and wounds have a wide range from the mere nick on a finger that heals without a trace to more serious scarifying cuts to what we now think of as true trauma, wounds to body and mind so severe as to forbid any easy healing.

I recall the story of Odysseus’s homecoming not just to note the essentially harmless boar hunt wound but to say that the resulting scar is tribal or familial: Odysseus is of the people who hunt the boar. No family or culture leaves its young unmarked; by a thousand cuts, we shape the bodies and minds of our progeny. All human communities have a sense of what an ideal man or woman looks like, and all children—even those with the happiest of childhoods—emerge locally marked or, to say it more positively, inscribed with a serviceable identity to be carried out of childhood into the given world, happily so if the child is lucky and loved, and necessarily so, as well, for—as much as we might value the spiritual practice of thinning out the self, of noticing its contingency and transience, of muting its fears and greed—there can be no forgetting the self until there is a self. As one Buddhist psychotherapist has said, “You have to be somebody before you can be nobody.” It helps to actually be a painter or a scientist before “sliding giddily off into the unknown.”

TRIBAL SCARS: THE READER. Serious traumatic memories make for easily understood, paradigmatic examples of the usefulness of forgetting. But to focus on the worst kinds of wounding hides the more subtle work—the self-forgetting—required to detach from the more or less benign scarification acquired as we grow. To illustrate with a case close at hand, my own father and mother never stinted in their child-shaping duties or, to tell the tale with a bit of distance, Lem and Betty left sufficient tribal markings on young Lewis that he might well remember who he was when he left home.

They were both big readers, Lem and Betty, as was my older brother, Lee, who would lie on his bed with a book (The Scarlet Pimpernel, The Father Brown Stories), while Lewis begged him to come out and play. Lewis was not a reader; he was a collector—butterflies, coins, rocks—and he liked to be outdoors building a lean-to in the woods, or playing baseball, or walking with his butterfly net or his rifle (for he was of the people who hunt the swallowtail and the woodchuck).

Urging him to read, Betty once told him that someday he would be in the army and that he would be crushingly bored unless he had the habit of reading. The admonition conjured a mental image in which he saw himself, a young soldier lying on his cot in the bunkhouse, reading. Sunlight streams in the windows. Deep silence. Where are the other men? They are scattered around the camp, lying limp beneath the cannons, collapsed on the mess hall tables, slack-jawed in the gym, zombified with boredom. Not Lewis. He is reading a book. He is not like other people.

Betty once paid him to read—fifty cents per book. She told him not to tell his father. The next time they went to the library he checked out The Story of Ferdinand and read it in one clip. Betty paid up, but allowed as to how she had had something more substantial in mind. Then he read Farmer Boy (a real fatty; he got a fifty-cent bonus). He read that one aggressively, flamboyantly, deliberately. The school bus came at 8:00, and he would get up at 6:30 to log a few pages before leaving the house. In later years, he could still see the image: dawn light (always that light!) fills the front hall of the house, he is on his way to the kitchen, but he has paused to read his book. Memory now splits the image, for he is both holding the book and looking down at himself from the landing of the stairs, the Reader performing for his elevated audience.

These are my own memories of young Lewis, but I have other testimony as well, for, week after week, decade after decade, Lem and Betty used to write to their own parents a “Family Letter” that gave accounts of all their doings. These I now have in my possession, and from them I learn, for example, that the year Lewis turned ten, Lem read Saul Bellow’s Adventures of Augie March (“a heavy book,” he wrote to his parents, but “showing great talent”). He read a biography of Lord Melbourne, the first volume of The Shorter Cambridge Medieval History (“fascinating; 643 pages”), Anna Karenina, The Old Wives’ Tale, The Way of All Flesh, The Aztecs of Mexico, The English Middle Classes, Medieval People, Flower Gardening, and a book “about the Roman Empire around Constantinople at the end of the eleventh century.”

Meanwhile, during the winter holiday, they “worked on [Lewis’s] reading endlessly, or so it seemed to me,” wrote Betty, “as he is a scatter-brain, not stupid I keep saying to myself, but certainly not very well organized.” In early summer, “Lewis was down sick for a week,” she reported, “but managed to read a 200 page book and seemed to enjoy it, and this gives us some delight because it seemed all too probable he would grow up illiterate.” But by August he is said to be in the tree house “reading comics” (while “all the time” his older brother “reads more books”).

SWEEPING THE TOMB. The Mumonkan, or Gateless Barrier, is a collection of Zen koans, or “cases,” gathered in the thirteenth century. Case 5 tells the story of Hsiang-yen, a smart young monk who, like many intellectuals, had a hard time with the practice. One day his teacher said to him, “A cerebral understanding of Zen is not much use. I suggest you work on this koan: Who were you before your parents were born?”

Hsiang-yen couldn’t figure it out. He went back to his room and looked through all the notes he had taken during his years of training, but he found nothing. He tried to get his teacher to tell him the answer, but the teacher said, “I really have nothing to say. I could tell you, but later you would revile me. Whatever understanding I have is my own and will never be yours.”

Hsiang-yen gave up. He burned his notes and decided he’d just be a rice-gruel monk and face the question moment by moment rather than trying to think it through. Hearing that the tomb of Nan-yang was being neglected, he said to himself, “I’ll go there, tend the garden around the tomb and lead a simple life. I can’t do any better.” He did that for years. He gave up trying to approach the Way through study. He didn’t give up completely: he didn’t kill himself or lead a life of debauchery. He just lived as simply as he could, keeping the koan in mind.

One day, while he was sweeping fallen leaves, his broom sent a stone flying. It hit a stalk of bamboo: tock! What a sound! The universe opened up. He understood. It was as if for all those years there had been ice melting invisibly from below and then, of a sudden, the ice was gone.

Hsiang-yen composed a poem that opens with the line “One tock! and I have forgotten all I knew.”

TRIBAL SCARS: THE SPELLER. There is a touching moment in a French movie about little children going to school when we see a young boy writing the number 7 on a blackboard: he draws the horizontal top line and then pauses because he can’t remember if the downward slash comes from the right or the left side of the line. He gets it wrong, but of course what we’re seeing is how utterly arbitrary is the correct form, how conventional and local for an as-yet-unmarked mind.

Just so with spelling, especially in English. Lem and Betty preserved a note that Lewis wrote when he was turning ten: BE SURE TO ATTEND LEWIS’S BIRTHDAY SELIBRACHON / ADDMISHON 15¢.

Not that getting Lewis to read and teaching him to spell wounded him in any way that didn’t soon scar over, but that’s the point. Gentle as their touch might have been, these folks were shaping the boy. He still remembers the tune by which they got “bicycle” lodged in his mind, and the tip Lem offered for remembering the difference between “principal” and “principle” (the principal of the school should be your pal ). Nor did Lem defend the English language or lack in sympathy for its victim. One report reads that “poor Lewis got only 90 in spelling today because he knew that as between ‘bridge’ and ‘canal,’ one of them ends with an ‘e’ and the other doesn’t. But he got the ‘e’ on the wrong one. He tries without success to apply logic to spelling.”

Lucky child to have that sympathetic father, but still, both man and boy are of the people who celebrate the principle that “bridge” ends in an e and whose children, if they are to thrive in this tribe, must leave home with that and all the other weird (wierd? weerd?) words on the weekly test incised on the mind like tattoos on the shaved head of a slave.

“EASE AND CHEER.” Emanuel Lasker was one of the greatest chess players of all time, holding the world championship for a full twenty-eight years beginning in 1894. His classic Manual of Chess, published in 1927, ends with some “final reflections on education in chess” that include this remark: “Chess must not be memorized. . . . Memory is too valuable to be stocked with trifles. Of my fifty-seven years I have applied at least thirty to forgetting most of what I had learned or read, and since I succeeded in this I have acquired a certain ease and cheer which I should never again like to be without.”

TRIBAL SCARS: THE HANDYMAN. In later years, one of Lewis’s friends, a successful Ivy League literary critic, passingly described him as being “handy,” a remark that irked him, for it felt as if it named a mere eccentricity, as if he knew Hittite grammar, say, or could recite the Pledge of Allegiance backward, whereas in the Hyde family being handy was a mark of the truly human (or at least of the truly human male). Visiting one of his daughters-in-law, Lem once asked if she had a hammer in the house. She did not know. In his later telling of the tale, it was clear that for Lem it was as if the woman did not know if her house had a bathroom.

Lem himself was exceedingly handy, a fixer and a tinkerer. It wasn’t only that there were half a dozen patents under his name (No. 3001450: the improved rearview mirror; No. 3246507: the puff tonometer; and so on); it was that every house they lived in was an extension of the lab, full of cunning devices like the pulley that allowed the rooftop TV antenna to be rotated from a ground-floor closet or the wiring that put a phone in the tree house or the switches that let you control the garage light from any of three locations. The acquisition of a quarter-inch drill was literally something to write home about. In the mid-1950s, their first-ever TV set had to be accompanied by a complete set of replacement vacuum tubes so that Lem could be the in-house repairman. For decades, a Bendix washing machine traveled with the family from house to house with Lem constantly fixing it. July 1955: “I took apart most of the Bendix to fix the valve which got in trouble with rust. I know all there is to know, now, about mixing valves in Bendixes.” When the thing finally died, it became an organ donor, the solenoid salvaged from the carcass making an automatic garage-door opener for the village fire department; as the sirens wailed, the firehouse door would fly up to greet the arriving volunteers.

When people asked Lewis how he became “handy,” he used to say that he really didn’t know beyond being curious and paying attention. But the Family Letters tell a different story. Lem buys Lewis a kit from which to make an electric motor. Lem pays Lewis three cents per shingle to help roof the garage. Lem’s quarter-inch drill is not for him alone: Lewis and his brother Lee are to run the wiring through the studs of the newly built guest room. Lewis builds model airplanes. He builds a birdhouse for Betty. He is given polarizing lenses, and Betty writes home, “Lewis spent a long time pasting various thicknesses of cellophane together so that he would have a varicolored butterfly when he put it between two polarizers. He will probably make a good scientist since he cares essentially nothing for the material things of this world and becomes absolutely engrossed in such projects. I never knew anyone so consistently oblivious to his surroundings.” Lem once bought Lewis a lens-grinding lap, “a tremendous piece of machinery which the two of us can scarcely lift,” Betty wrote. The gift arrived one Christmas Day, “and Lewis has spent almost all his time since then polishing agates that he found in Minnesota last summer. His hands turn blue from the abrasive, and he is perfectly blissful.”

TRIBAL SCARS: THE SMARTY. Like an invisible electric fence by which a dog can be kept to its proper yard, in Lewis’s childhood a surround of offhand remarks about intelligence (“not stupid I keep saying to myself”) marked the line between the Dummies and the Smarties of this world. The Family Letters bear some traces: a carpenter’s helper described as “a little lacking mentally”; a cousin’s daughter graduating from college with “honors in chemistry though not cum laude”; Lewis in the fourth grade testing at the sixth-grade level; brother Lee in the seventh testing at the tenth.

The substance of these observations is not the point but rather that they were worthy of speech in the first place, that it mattered to mark the categories, to sort the population, hand out the uniforms, and begin the endless back-and-forth of wits and half-wits, show and shame, the copulatory friction of identity-by-difference that repeats itself again and again into the future, there being no final resting place once the weary game has begun, for the tenth grade is followed by the eleventh, eleventh by twelfth, twelfth by college, graduate school, a job, another job, the horizon of Smartville receding with every achieved approach. The only relief would be to quit the game entirely; ah, but that would mean self-expulsion from the very tribe that brought you into being, exile from the one homeland whose citizens can always be counted on to remember who you are.

In the last week of freshman year at the state university, Lewis slept through the final exam in chemistry, and although the kindly professor allowed him to take the test late, he ended up with a D in the course. This was a case not of a sleeper dreaming that he has forgotten an exam but of dreams themselves allowing the sleeper to forget an exam in fact. Betty said she had hoped that after a successful first year he could transfer to an Ivy League school, but now it was hopeless. He’d crossed the line. As the sun rose, some subtle, resistant force had deposited the slumbering youth on the shores of Dumbville.

Years later, when he was accepted as a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, his hosts bragged to the incoming fellows that percentage-wise it was harder to get into the Institute than it was to get into the freshman class at Harvard. Back across the line! What an honor! And yet an honor, it turned out, that brought an unexpected grief, for when Lewis got the news, his first impulse was to pick up the phone and call home, to close the loop with the authors and original audience of this element of Who He Was. But it was too late. Lem and Betty were both ten years dead.

FEED ON THE PRESENT. Larry Rosenberg, a dharma teacher from the Insight Meditation Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, tells of the time he was in New York City with a free afternoon and his wife suggested that they visit the Tenement Museum, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Untouched for over fifty years, the museum’s apartments present preserved examples of the housing offered to immigrant families in the early twentieth century. Rosenberg himself had been born and raised in a similar building in the same neighborhood and found himself unexpectedly transported into the past.

“Suddenly certain things started to come back to me about my past, and I couldn’t talk for quite a while.” Asking himself, “Did I come out of this? Did I grow up here? How can that be?” he was mostly struck by the great distance between the life he had come to live and that long-ago childhood. “Seeing the size of what was called the bathroom, which was more like a telephone booth—no bathtub, no shower, et cetera. And my memories of living with my parents, my mother’s three sisters and brother, and both my grandparents in a space like this.”

Rosenberg told this story in the context of a talk about a distinction he draws from Buddhist teaching between “real time” and “psychological time.” With real time, we do not dwell on (or dwell in) the past or the future but simply note them (saying, “I grew up in New York” or “When I retire I’m going to Florida,” and so on). With psychological time, on the other hand, past and future take over the present; we live in them, identifying with their pleasures and pains. As the Buddhists say, we “make self” out of them (as I might make self out of my pride in publishing a book or my shame over having flunked a chemistry exam).

In Rosenberg’s case, what struck him in this regard was not the Tenement Museum itself but the way his account of the visit changed over time. At first it had been a bare experience. It “sort of opened me up, and I saw something about my origins and a sense of myself. . . . Right on the spot I was quiet. I didn’t want to talk for a while. I was very moved by it. Some of it was painful, a lot of it was pleasant, but . . . it conveyed to me the distance I had traveled, socially, psychologically.”

Later, however, when he got home and recounted the story to various friends, “the telling started to change a bit, from it just being a straight report of a fact and what I went through. I saw that it was promoting the self. What it was saying was, ‘ Aren’t I wonderful! I started here, and then I was a professor, and I dropped out, and now I’m a dharma teacher, and I know how to dress—I’m a real American guy!’” The story had picked up self-importance along the way; “there was some mileage coming from it.”

Rosenberg is clear that this kind of self-making may be unavoidable and often harmless, but as a matter of Buddhist practice it should at least be noticed, be brought to mind. “I saw what the mind was doing; the mind was taking materials from the past—at first they were just ‘factual’ but then it immediately started to use them for the present, the present sense of myself. . . . The self is constantly using the materials of the past and the future to nourish itself, to build itself up. . . . I didn’t do it consciously. . . . It just happened. The ego is going to work, and that’s what it knows how to do.”

Rosenberg likes to use a food metaphor to describe how the ego functions: it feeds on the past and the future. There is a Buddhist scripture from the Pali canon, the Samyutta Nikaya, that says of practitioners who are “peaceful in mind,”

They do not lament over the past,

they yearn not for what is to come,

they maintain themselves in the present,

thus their complexion is serene.

In Rosenberg’s own reading of these verses, the third line becomes “they nourish themselves in the present.” Such is the food of a serene self-forgetfulness. Self-making, on the other hand, feeds on time past and time to come. “The continuation of psychological time and the survival of the ego are really the same thing,” says Rosenberg.

CHANGES OF IDENTITY. “Forget your past, your customs, and your ideals,” reads a Yiddish guidebook printed in Odessa and given to Jews on their way to New York in the 1890s. The waters of the river Lethe feed directly into the oceans surrounding the American continent. Americans have always claimed the right to reinvent themselves, and all changes of identity call for strong doses of forgetfulness. Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” stands as one of our earliest odes to forgetfulness in the service of a shifting self: “Why drag about this corpse of your memory, lest you contradict something you have stated in this or that public place? Suppose you should contradict yourself; what then? It seems to be a rule of wisdom never to rely on your memory alone . . . but to bring the past for judgment into the thousand-eyed present, and live ever in a new day.”

The transcendentalists wrote their own guidebooks to the New World, eager as they were to forget European culture and establish their own. “The Atlantic is a Lethean stream, in our passage over which we have had an opportunity to forget the Old World and its institutions,” wrote Henry Thoreau in a typical passage. “If we do not succeed this time, there is perhaps one more chance for the race . . . , and that is in the Lethe of the Pacific, which is three times as wide.”

IN TIBET. In 2000, The New York Review of Books carried a report by Ian Buruma about his trip to Tibet. The Chinese have been diligently trying to wipe out the Tibetan language and culture, making it impossible for young Tibetans to study their own history, especially their religious heritage. Their efforts are a species of the “organized forgetting” that Milan Kundera described in regard to Soviet propaganda in Eastern Europe.

And yet Buruma meets a Tibetan Muslim in a restaurant for whom religion has a different meaning: in the past, as in Myanmar more recently, the Buddhists, intent on maintaining their own purity, had persecuted the Muslims such that they and Tibet’s other religious minorities view Buddhism with a sense of unease.

This Muslim turned out to be the only Tibetan with whom Buruma spoke who didn’t care about the diminishment of the Tibetan language “or the new dominance in urban areas of Chinese low life and pop culture.” This man spoke “like a true modernist. It was inevitable, he said, that traditions were hollowed out by modern life. . . . The crude new cosmopolitanism of Lhasa was . . . part of his liberation.”

The story echoes that “forget your traditions” advice given to America’s immigrant Jews. It seems to promise a secular, pluralist state that welcomes the forgetting of difference and its consequent fluid identity. In this case, it’s a false promise, of course, a swapping out of one set of differences for another, of a purely Buddhist agenda for a purely Communist one.

“KENOSIS” means an emptying out, as in Saint Paul’s charge to the Philippians: “Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in human likeness.”

To “look . . . to the interests of others” means to forget about the self that knows itself in opposition to those others, which is to say that the passage is commonly read as a teaching: self-emptying is the cure of pride. In that line, one point of the pages about tribal scarring was to say that “Lewis” is of the people who take pride in their literacy, their mastery of tools, and their intelligence. And that with such pride comes identity—identity through difference. “I” am “I” because I am not one of those who’ve never heard of a solenoid, who have no interest in Constantinople at the end of the eleventh century, who never made it to the Ivy League.

If such difference amounts to self-elevation, then kenosis calls for descent into some humbler form. On the other hand, but just as important, if difference amounts to self-debasement (“I” should be ashamed!), then kenosis calls for a move in the opposite direction, an emptying out of servitude and assumption of some less marked way of being. Either way—proud or ashamed, high or low, master or servant, literate or illiterate, smart or dumb—this emptying finally means letting go of all such oppositions. The crossroad where dualities meet and cancel each other out—that is the site of the self-forgetfulness whose consequence is the death of identity by difference. Concludes Saint Paul, “Being found in human form, [Jesus] humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross.”