A Primer for Forgetting. Lewis Hyde

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