A Primer for Forgetting. Lewis Hyde

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.

      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