A Primer for Forgetting. Lewis Hyde
window and suddenly remember a dream that I forgot when I woke up, so too the student is directed to the particulars of this world that they might trigger recollection of the previously known noble ideals. “At last, in a flash, understanding of each blazes up, and the mind . . . is flooded with light.”
TO SECURE AN IDEAL, surround it with a moat of forgetfulness.
AMERICAN EPISTEMOLOGY. An early chapter of Herman Melville’s Confidence-Man describes an encounter between a man wearing mourning clothes (the con man himself) and a country merchant. When the man in mourning introduces himself as an old acquaintance, the merchant protests: he has no recollection of their ever meeting.
“I see you have a faithless memory,” says the con man. “But trust in the faithfulness of mine.”
“Well, to tell the truth, in some things my memory ain’t of the very best,” replies the puzzled merchant.
“I see, I see; quite erased from the tablet,” says the con man. “About six years back, did it happen to you to receive any injury on the head? Surprising effects have arisen from such a cause. Not alone unconsciousness . . . , but likewise—strange to add—oblivion, entire and incurable.”
He himself, the con man says, was once kicked by a horse and couldn’t remember a thing about it, relying on friends to tell him what happened. “You see, sir, the mind is ductile, very much so: but images, ductilely received into it, need a certain time to harden and bake in their impressions. . . . We are but clay, sir, potter’s clay.”
Drawn in, the merchant confesses that, yes, he once suffered a brain fever and lost his mind for quite some time.
“There now, you see, I was not wholly mistaken. That brain fever accounts for it all,” replies the man in mourning. How sad that the merchant has forgotten their friendship! And, by the way, would he mind loaning “a brother” a shilling?
The whole of The Confidence-Man is a Platonic dialogue for a fallen age. Every episode hangs on the question, should we or shouldn’t we have confidence in the story being told? How are we to know the truth? In the case at hand, the con man’s key move is the erasure of memory; that allows him to detach his claim of old acquaintanceship from the world of empirical knowledge whereupon its veracity becomes a matter of faith. Having accepted the con man’s suggestion—yes, there was brain-fever forgetfulness—the merchant is left with little to go on but the story at hand. And the con man is an artful storyteller. In another country and another time, he could have been a great novelist, but he is on the Mississippi River in the mid-nineteenth century and he’s given himself over to toying with the locals.
Having severed the merchant’s ties to his own recollections, the con man moves in close. “I want a friend in whom I may confide,” he says, and begins to unfold the sad story of his recent grief. Before too long the country merchant finds himself moved beyond the solicited shilling: “As the story went on, he drew from his wallet a bank note, but after a while, at some still more unhappy revelation, changed it for another, probably of a somewhat larger amount.”
In Melville’s America, it’s not light flooding the mind that’s the mark of true belief; it’s money changing hands.
TO SECURE A LIE, surround it with a moat of forgetfulness.
“THE PRECIPITATE” of a sixteen-year exploration, thoughts written down “as remarks, short paragraphs, of which there is sometimes a fairly long chain about the same subject” while at other times “a sudden change, jumping from one topic to another,” says Wittgenstein of his Philosophical Investigations.
“Writer is weary unto death of making up stories,” writes David Markson on the opening page of This Is Not a Novel, adding, more than a hundred pages later, “Nonlinear. Discontinuous. Collage-like. An assemblage.”
CIRCLES. Dinner at the round mahogany table that Mother and Father bought in London fifty years ago. Father has read a book about the erosion of ocean beaches on the East Coast. Mother says, “That book never mentions the hurricane of ’38.” She was nineteen that year and in college at Mount Holyoke. “I don’t know how I knew it,” she says, “but I knew there was an eye to the storm, and so I made my way to Safford Hall.” Two minutes later she says, “That book never mentions the hurricane of ’38. I don’t know how I knew it, but I knew there was an eye to the storm, and so I made my way to Safford Hall.” Later she says, “That book never mentions the hurricane of ’38. I don’t know how I knew it, but I knew there was an eye to the storm, and so I made my way to Safford Hall.”
“You’re going in circles,” Father says. They say the CAT scan showed some atrophy of her frontal lobes, but the old material is still there. She is very much her old self. Her verbal tics and defenses remain. “Well, now, Mrs. Pettibone,” she says to herself, staring into the refrigerator before dinner. “We’ll cope.” “We’ll get along.” She is the shell of her old self, calcified language and no organism alive enough to lay down new layers.
Would it be possible to live in such a way as to never acquire habits of mind? When my short-term memory goes, I don’t want to be penned up in the wickerwork of my rote responses. If I start being my old self, no heroic measures, please.
SPEECHLESS. In Chinese myth, Old Lady Mêng sits at the exit from the underworld serving the Broth of Oblivion so that all reincarnated souls come to life having forgotten the spirit world, their former incarnations, and even their speech (although legend has it that occasionally a miracle child is born talking, having avoided Lady Mêng’s broth).
REMEMBER WHO YOU ARE. Says Jorge Luis Borges, “I should say I am greedy for death, that I want to stop waking up every morning, finding: Well, here I am, I have to go back to Borges.
“There’s a word in Spanish. . . . Instead of saying ‘to wake up,’ you say recordarse, that is, to record yourself, to remember yourself. . . . Every morning I get that feeling because I am more or less nonexistent. Then when I wake up, I always feel I’m being let down. Because, well, here I am. Here’s the same old stupid game going on. I have to be somebody. I have to be exactly that somebody.”
AGAINST INSOMNIA. In an essay in the journal Nature, Graeme Mitchison and Francis Crick (one of the men who discovered the shape of DNA) once argued, “We dream in order to forget.” Each of our days is so filled with particularity, we are so swamped with sensory detail, that the mind needs some sort of filtering mechanism to sort out the trivial and retain the essential. Dreaming, Crick argues, serves this function. In fact, without some such process we would all be like the monstrous title character of Borges’s short story “Funes, the Memorious,” who is unable to forget even the smallest details of his day, so that a tree at 3:06 p.m. with the light just so on its leaves stays with him as wholly distinct from the same tree two minutes later shaded by a cloud. Funes “was . . . almost incapable of general, platonic ideas,” Borges’s narrator remarks, for “to think is to forget a difference, to generalize, to abstract.” It is required of us to forget many particular trees before we can know Tree itself. The ancients broadened the stroke, saying that it is required of us to forget entire worlds—the Age of Iron, these eons of hearsay—before we can recall to mind eternal things.
STATE-TRANSITION AMNESIA. The old mythmakers often puzzled over how a person might either preserve memory or induce forgetfulness when moving from one state of being to another, focusing usually on the transition between life and death (entering the underworld / emerging from the womb) but also on crossing the boundaries between different eras (the golden age / the Age of Iron), places (home/away), moods (rage/ equanimity), and levels of consciousness (waking/sleep).
The ancients also showed an interest in the amnesic effects of various drugs and thus of the line between sobriety and intoxication. (In Homer, we hear of nepenthe easing men’s “pains and irritations, making them forget their troubles,” and of the home-forgetting power of the lotus plant; or in China, think of the Broth of Oblivion Old Lady Mêng serves to the child about to be born.)
Nowadays, we might frame the boundary effects of such transitions in terms of “state-dependent memory,” the idea being that memories