A Primer for Forgetting. Lewis Hyde

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