A Primer for Forgetting. Lewis Hyde

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