A Primer for Forgetting. Lewis Hyde
spells and, as with the severed head of Orpheus singing still in a cave at Lesbos, this head went on sharing its secrets whenever Odin was in need. Says the seeress in the Völuspá, “Odin murmured with Mímir’s head” as Ragnarok—the doom of the gods—drew near.
Some have suggested that what is found in Mímir’s spring is not only water but also the giant’s severed head or, rather, his skull, there being Celtic and Germanic traditions in which skulls placed in wells give curative and prophetic power, especially if the skull itself is used as the drinking vessel (as one once was by the poet Byron, who, discovering on his estate the bones of “some jolly friar,” had the skull mounted as a cup for wine—“the drink of Gods”—so as to “rhyme and revel with the dead” in imitation “of the Goths of old”).
WATERS BUBBLE UP. Bruce Lincoln, a historian of religions at Chicago, once gathered a range of Indo-European myths and tried to reconstruct from them a single proto-Indo-European myth about what happens to the souls of the dead as they travel through the underworld. His essay “Waters of Memory,
Waters of Forgetfulness” lays out this proto-myth; in it, the dead must first drink from a spring or cross a river or lake whose waters wash away all their memories. Their memories are not lost, however: dissolved in the water, they are carried to a spring where they bubble up to be drunk by certain individuals—bards, prophets, seers—who become infused with wisdom, knowing, as it were, the collective experience of all who came before.
In the Greek case, the river Lethe carries the waters of forgetfulness; in the Orphic tradition, they are found in a spring marked by a white cypress “to the left of the house of Hades.” In the Upanishads, the early Vedic texts from India, the dead come to the river Vijara—“Apart for Old Age”—and cross it “by mind,” shaking off their past deeds both good and bad. In the Norse stories, the waters of forgetfulness plausibly belong to the river Gjöll, which flows “next to the gates of Hel,” the realm of all the dead but for the battle-slain.
For an example of where this water might emerge, Lincoln turns to Mímir’s spring, for it was there, by drinking the waters of memory, that All-Father Odin acquired his wisdom.
TWO CATEGORIES. A lively imagination requires a balance of memory and forgetting. “You should go in for a blending of the two elements, memory and oblivion,” says Jorge Luis Borges, “and we call that imagination.” Because Mnemosyne is the mother of the Muses, all arts require her double power, her ability to record or erase as the need may be. There are then two ways for memory to destroy imagination: by retaining too many abstractions (thus failing to perceive fresh detail) and by retaining too many details (thus failing to perceive abstractions, as with Borges’s Funes). The point is worth repeating because two beneficial categories of forgetting recur throughout these notebooks: in one, a mind has become too attached to its concepts or thought-habits and needs to drop them so as to attend again to detail; in the other, a surfeit of detail clogs the flow of thought and must be winnowed so as to reveal the larger shapes of concept and abstraction.
NO FAMILY, NO MOTHER. Roland Barthes, looking at photographs, made a rule for himself so as to avoid the first of the two ways that memory might deaden imagination: he tried never to reduce himself to the “disincarnated, disaffected” kinship categories popular in the social sciences. “This principle obligated me to ‘forget’ two institutions: the Family, the Mother.”
Barthes made himself drop such categories so as to preserve the particularity of his mother, who had recently died and whom he was trying to call to mind by looking at photographs. Most of the images he found failed to bring her back. “I never recognized her except in fragments”—a part of her face, the way she held her hands—“which is to say that I missed her being.”
Yet finally he found an image that was “indeed essential,” that achieved, “utopically, the impossible science of the unique being.” “The photograph was very old. The corners were blunted from having been pasted into an album, the sepia print had faded, and the picture just managed to show two children standing together at the end of a little wooden bridge in a glassed-in conservatory. . . . My mother was five at the time.”
In the book in which he tells this story, Camera Lucida, Barthes illustrates his argument with many images, but he never reproduces this essential photograph. “It exists only for me.” Others might see in it the late nineteenth century—its clothing, its architecture—they might even see “the Family, the Mother,” but none would see the unique being, the one that mattered to Roland Barthes.
Sometimes a considered forgetting is the first step toward bringing the memory of the dead to life.
The real constitution of each thing is accustomed to hide itself.
—HERACLITUS, FRAG. 123
FORGOTTEN IS ALSO TRUE. How odd that the Greek word now translated as “truth” is a negative—a-lethe, the not-forgotten, the un-concealed—the implication being that the ground condition of the world (or of the mind) is obscurity and mystery and that persons who speak the truth have done the work of (or been given a gift for) un-hiding, calling to mind what is otherwise veiled, covered, dark, silent.
Marcel Detienne’s Masters of Truth in Archaic Greece lists three persons thought capable of such work in the archaic age: the poet, the prophet, and the just king. These were the vessels through whom a power called Aletheia spoke. The knowledge she offered was “a form of divinatory omniscience”; she gave the poet “the power to ‘decipher the invisible,’” to recall not the past exactly but the atemporal suchness of things, their otherwise obscure being.
And although this divine power may overcome or negate obscurity and mystery, by Detienne’s reading she is not split or separated from those ground conditions: “Aletheia and Lethe are not exclusive or contradictory . . . ; they constitute two extremes of a single religious power.”
In archaic Greece, these twin forces belonged to a set of related dualities, Aletheia aligned with memory, justice, sung speech, light, and praise, and Lethe aligned with oblivion, hiddenness, silence, darkness, and blame. Aletheia “was not the opposite of lies or falsehoods”; she was the opposite of all these other things, or rather she is one portion of an ambiguous force that can enlighten or darken, can lead to speech or silence, praise or blame. The Muses are agents not just of memory but of memory-forgetting (as in Hesiod, where their song brings both memory and “the forgetting of ills,” or in the Iliad, where they punish a boastful Thracian singer by making him “forget his artful playing”).
Let us then reclaim forgetting as a component of truth, there being “no Aletheia without a measure of Lethe.” When a diviner or poet penetrates the invisible world, Memory and Oblivion both are present. And what is the name of this double thing found at the seam of silence and speech, praise and blame, light and darkness? Call it imagination, call it poetry.
THE BIRTH OF A MEMORY ART. Cicero’s book on oratory recounts the origin story of the Memory Palace tradition, the one in which an orator commits to memory the elements of his speech by mentally placing an image for each of his points in a sequence of locations, as if in the rooms of a palace. Cicero has a certain Antonius express his gratitude “to the famous Simonides of Ceos, who is said to have first invented the science of mnemonics,” and then has Antonius tell the story:
Simonides was dining at the house of a wealthy nobleman named Scopas . . . , and chanted a lyric poem which he had composed in honour of his host, in which he followed the custom of the poets by including for decorative purposes a long passage referring to Castor and Pollux; whereupon Scopas with excessive meanness told him he would pay him half the fee agreed on for the poem. . . . The story runs that a little later a message was brought to Simonides to go outside, as two young men were standing at the door who earnestly requested him to come out; so he rose from his seat and went out, and could not see anybody.
It seems that the young men were in fact Castor and Pollux, grateful for being noted in Simonides’s poem and protecting him from a punishment about to be inflicted on the stingy patron:
In the interval