A Primer for Forgetting. Lewis Hyde
of memory, the story is typically told of the drunk who hides his car keys while on a bender and can’t remember where he put them until he gets drunk again. Empirical research has never produced such a clear-cut case, but studies done with various drugs—alcohol, amphetamines, barbiturates, marijuana, nicotine, and more—nonetheless show that state-dependent memory is not just folklore.
In one experiment, college students smoked marijuana—half of the joints nicely laced with psychotropic THC and the other half inert—and then studied a dozen sets of words grouped into categories. Under “flowers,” for example, appeared two common names (“pansy” and “rose”) and two less common (“jonquil” and “zinnia”). Days later, the students were tested on how many words they could remember. When the previously stoned students got stoned again, their ability to recall improved by 10 or 15 percent.
So, yes, state-dependent memory exists, although, as the small percentages of such studies indicate, the drug effects are weak and limited.
And no matter the strength of the drug effects, state dependency has a fairly simple explanation: recollection is often tied to context, and drug intoxication is itself a context. Just as a return to the site of an event—either in mind or in fact—will bring back memories, so too will a return to being stoned.
And it is by focusing on changes of context that we’ll find the positive value not so much of memory reclaimed as of the initial forgetting that accompanies the move from one state to another. Memories that endure no matter how our contexts change can be a hindrance, not a boon, if the history they carry forward obscures the new setting rather than illuminating it. In such cases, what one study called “the amnesic effect of state change” allows a welcome attention to the new and unexpected. It would be all to the good if the drunk could school himself in sobriety and never remember where he hid the car keys.
GRANDMA HYDE VERSUS FOUCAULT. “The analysis of descent permits the dissociation of the self,” rather than its unification, writes Michel Foucault. The truth about who you are lies not at the root of the tree but rather out at the tips of the branches, the thousand tips.
In 1937, my grandmother published The Descendents of Andrew Hyde, himself the “sixth in descent from William Hyde of Norwich, Connecticut,” this William Hyde being born in England, probably in 1610, and coming to the colonies in 1633.
Twelve generations separate me from William Hyde. I have two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents. . . . My forebears from 1610 may number 2,048. Grandmother’s book remembers William Hyde but forgets 2,047 other ancestors, including William’s wife.
To practice subversive genealogy means to forget the idealism of a singular forefather and remember these thousands. With that remembrance you must multiply the sense of who you are, multiply it until it disappears. Even Foucault studies the self to forget the self.
GOLD ORPHIC TABLET AND CASE FOUND IN PETELIA, SOUTHERN ITALY
FROM THE MUSEUM OF FORGETTING: THE TWO WATERS. The Petelia tablet is a thin sheet of gold inscribed with lines of somewhat muddled Greek—verses taken from a longer Orphic poem of great antiquity. Discovered in a tomb in southern Italy and dating from the fourth century B.C., this gold sheet was rolled up and placed in a cylinder hung on a chain around the neck of the dead. It contains instructions on how to travel safely through the underworld. These say to the initiate,
In the halls of Hades you will find on the right, by a ghostly cypress tree, a spring where the dead souls descending wash away their lives. Do not even draw close to this spring for it offers the Waters of Forgetfulness.
Farther on you will find the pool of Memory. Over this stand guardians. They will ask with keen mind what is your quest in the gloom of deadly Hades. Tell them the whole truth straight out. Say: “I am the child of Earth and starry Heaven, but of Heaven is my true lineage. I am parched with thirst and perishing: give me quickly chill water flowing from the pool of Memory.”
Assuredly the kings of the underworld take pity on you, and will give you water from the spring; then you, when you have drunk, traverse the holy path which other initiates and bacchants tread in glory. After that you will rule among the other heroes.
THE TEST. The doctor asked Mother to remember three words, two concrete and one abstract: “rose, virtue, shoe.” Ten minutes later, he asked if she remembered them. “Virtue” had slipped away. Father told the story at dinner, repeating the words himself. Mother looked trapped, distressed. She went to bed early in those days, and Father was perplexed. “What did we use to do in the evenings?” he asked.
THE TWO WATERS—AN ORACLE. In his second-century Description of Greece, the historian Pausanias tells us that a certain Trophonios—perhaps a hero, perhaps a god, but in any event a power (the name means “Nourisher of the Mind”)—had an oracle at Labadie. Any man wanting to inquire about the future would descend into Trophonios’s cave having first purified himself for several days, bathing only in the river Herkyna and making sacrifices, especially the sacrifice of a ram whose entrails would reveal whether the inquiry would be graciously received.
On the night of his descent, the petitioner would be taken to the river by two young boys who would wash and anoint him with oil. Priests would then lead him to two fountains standing near each other. From these he would drink the Water of Lethe so as to forget his past and the Water of Mnemosyne so as to recall all he saw during his descent. Dressed in linen, he would then climb a ladder down into the chasm, lie on his back, thrust his legs feetfirst into a hole, the rest of his body being swiftly drawn in like that of a man pulled under by the current of a fast-flowing river.
Later, having learned of the future, he would be swept upward again, his feet darting first out of the same opening. The priests would set him on the Chair of Memory, where, paralyzed with fear and unaware of himself and his surroundings, he would speak what he had seen and heard. Then he would be given over to his relatives, who would care for him until he recovered the ability to laugh.
The two waters of Trophonios’s oracle differ from those of the Petelia tablet and other Orphic poems giving instruction to the dead. In the Orphic case, a choice has to be made: forgetfulness must be avoided, memory alone offering a path out of this world. In the case of this oracle, on the other hand, the two waters appear in a sequence and are complementary, not contradictory. They bespeak the conjoining or the ambiguity of Forgetting/Not-Forgetting, Covering/Discovering, Lethe/Aletheia, each power inseparable from and shadowed by the other. Supplicants do not choose between the two but instead become vessels in which the waters are held in a single solution.
What is the sign or the mark of those who have drunk that blend of Memory and Forgetting? Here it is laughter.
BADMINTON. “One who has perfected himself in the twin arts of remembering and forgetting is in a position to play at battledore and shuttlecock with the whole of existence,” says Søren Kierkegaard.
APOPTOSIS. As the human embryo develops, its organs are shaped by a process known as “programmed cell death.” Two flipper-like appendages turn into hands as the cells between the fingers die off, separating the digits. Sometimes the cells just fall away, and at other times they are devoured by other cells, there being at least two forms of natural cell death—autophagy, or self-eating, and apoptosis, from the Greek for the “dropping off” of petals from flowers or leaves from trees. Both of these must be distinguished from the cell death that results from traumatic wounds, disease, or old age. Trauma simply damages the body, whereas programmed cell death carves useful organs and tissues out of otherwise undifferentiated flesh. It is a shaping force, an aesthetic force.
Normal forgetting is the programmed cell death of mental life. It winnows the day. It shapes experience into a useful story.
MÍMIR’S SKULL. All-Father Odin, leaving one of his eyes as a pledge, acquired his ancestral knowledge and runic wisdom by drinking the waters that bubble up in Mímir’s spring at one of the roots of the World Tree, the great ash Yggdrasil. The giant Mímir (the name means “memory”) guards that spring, and he too “is full of ancient