A Primer for Forgetting. Lewis Hyde

      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