Lately, I have been obsessed with memory, absence, keepsakes, monuments, transgressive translation theories—and David Naimon’s remarkable podcast, Between the Covers. Enter Lewis Hyde’s A Primer for Forgetting: Getting Past the Past (Picador, 2019), a book structured as an episodic notebook, a collage form that juxtaposes “not just free association but free forgetting.”
Towards the end, Hyde explains that random leaping across time and nation-states, political mythologies and spiritual myths, is an intentional strategy that declines “to declare a train of thought.” He refuses to interpret the gaps, as “interpretation too readily declared dims the lights of things” while “holding off allows the elements to glow.”
And it is true that these elements glow, glow—grow to near glowering. Hyde is fine with this. He intends that the spaces between entries “foreground what happens with any book we read”—what happens with the act of reading, itself, wherein we absorb certain images while abandoning others. [Aside to Ionesco’s rhinoceros: I am tempted to argue for interesting extensions to current critique/ literary theory in americanist academic spaces but that would be a different thing, an alternate direction, a strip mall with lonelier parking lots and standardized, ticket-incurring gaps.]
What Hyde wants is for the book’s form to resemble the neurological experience of remembering, forgetting, self-mythologizing, and collating tiny scraps of monuments into selfhood, its scatterings:
The episodic form acknowledges the collaged afterlife of anything we read—or of any life, for that matter, for we we too are discontinuous creatures, scattered in time, the meaning of our existence something we can only imagine.
This book inspired me to write, to remember, to forget, to hold world history against the world and its historians, to wrestle the self-loathing of oppositional identities as I have experienced (and embodied) them in both the South and the Romanian emigre community. In the spirit of this love, complicity, horror, hope, and fascination, I leave you with a few notebooking avenues directly inspired by Hyde’s collage.
1.
Forgetting is the shears with which you cut away what you cannot use, doing it under the supreme discretion of memory….When we say that we consign something to oblivion, we suggest simultaneously that it is to be forgotten and yet also remembered.
- Soren Kierkegaard
For Lewis, there is a paradoxical nature to consigning a memory for forgetting. If the etymology of consigning comes from a Latin word meaning “to mark with a seal,” what does it mean to consign to forgetting? And my mind meandered into consignment stores, where one encounters the difference between consigning and giving away. Or what we keep so close that we cannot give away, choosing instead to re-sell it through a third party, imagining a value to the memory, something others might pay to keep.
Maybe this requires sketching, a notebook, a pen, your head formulating words to loosely describe shelf or a table or a rack in the Consignment Boutique of Forgetting—the objects on this shelf, the memories attached to them, marked for sale. Maybe this is the beginning of a short fiction about disputed value, and the voices in dispute, the varied valorizations of individual memories and experience. Maybe it’s a list poem. Maybe it’s an essay. Maybe it’s a notebook entry that kills time by underestimating it.
2.
Things we remember for their artifice. Lewis recollects two incidents from childhood: being seven, choosing the bun he thinks Mrs. Brown wants him to select (i.e. the moral bun) in a bakeshop and, later, being ten in a kitchen agreeing with his mom that she should get a haircut because he thinks that’s what she wants him to say. He wonders:
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 marks on memory.
O the injurious heart, how it collects and recollects the ways in which one’s behavior aimed to please or conform with social scripts. Recollect five such events from any point in your life. Write them down as lists, including details. Then pick one to poem with an eye to the strangest estrangement.
3.
In describing Slobodan Milosevic’s celebrations of the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo, Lewis explores the way this date, June 28th, was weaponized for ethnic war and genocide. To ignite a sense of grievance, Milosevic’s speech declaimed shattered national dignity and humiliation, the violation of motherland, the idea of treason, the counterpoint of courage and heroism in dying for an abstract cause. It was an evocation of lost causes. In Hyde’s words: “Thus does a lost cause’s causes apparent humiliation get turned on its head and become proof of the highest ideals.”
Psychiatrist Vamik Volkan coined the term “chosen trauma” to describe “an identity-forming ancestral calamity whose memory mixes actual history with passionate feeling and fantasized grieving and hope.” He spoke from the ground of his own loss:
“..the idea that [the Serbs] could change their minds and choose a kingdom on earth was not articulated until the awakening of nationalism in Europe in the nineteenth century.”
For the notebook: pick an identity group in which you are a participant or communicant (i.e. Catholic Church, Southerner, Russian, Ukranian, Uighur, academic, etc.) and take notes on the potential events or loci of chosen trauma, the words used as descriptors, the lexicon of humiliation, the allusion to eschatological fulfillment or what might bring change). Alternately, write a brief sketch of a Civil War reenactment from the point of view of a Confederate-identifying participant. Research news articles and features reports for particular lexicons, note any references to transcendent experience and/or descriptions of rootedness, of feeling part of something bigger. Consider writing a fictional interview with this participant.
4.
In 1882, Ernest Renan published his paper, “What Is A Nation?”. It warned against confusing nationality and ethnicity—since this confusion could lead to irresolvable military conflict. On Renan’s view, “ethnographic politics” was destabilized by the metaphysical nature of its claims, and how those claims evolved over time, how those claims depended on the exclusion of others in the name of ethnic purity. Renan believed it was better to forget ethnic claims and rigid ethnic identities which could no exist in multilingual spaces: “…the essence of a nation is that all its individuals have many things in common, and also that everyone has forgotten many things.”
Hyde argues that “all group identity, all abstract knowing, has such origins", and even “families know themselves by their recollection and elision..” For your notebook, sketch what recollections constitute your family identity. Start nuclear and then move to include extended family. Climb as high in the family tree as you wish. Or, just circle the trunk. Then sketch the elisions, the things no one discusses, the forgetting which prevents conflict—who is asked to sacrifice most to maintain these elisions? Who is the beneficiary? Play with the words collision, collusion, and elision.
5.
Mythological memory applies the logic of myth to the unstable narratives of the personal or public. It offers an easy way of divining meaning from inexplicable human tangles. I think of Orpheus, how he calls the poet—to do a Brodsky or Rilke and change Orpheus’ myth in a way that encapsulates personal fears of rejection or loss. Or Oscar Wilde’s Salome as the spurned lover, seeking the kiss of John the Baptist, the conquest.
“It’s an American ending, a Lone Star ending with the kind of individualist forgetting that cannot possibly scale. We get private romance but no model of how to study the nation to forget the nation.”
Thus does Hyde frame “Forget the Alamo!”, the final line of John Sayles’ movie Lone Star, as spoken by the Chicanx history teacher, Pilar (in contrast to “Remember the Alamo!" that bit of memorabilia on the postcards and t-shirts of American boyhoods). A diptych perhaps, a two-sided image of remembering and forgetting on the same page.
6.
“Man does not die in a ditch like a dog—but at home in history,” wrote Boris Pasternak. Hyde elucidates “state-transition amnesia,” the struggle of the newly-bereaved. It could be the loss of a pet or the loss of a homeland. How does the end of Yugoslavia define what it means to be born as a Yugoslavian? What stories fill the narrative gap?
I keep thinking of how accommodating one’s self to loss requires forgetting, burying the past, forgetting my mother’s voice so that other humans can feel less haunted—and how this amounts to a betrayal.
Forgetting is the only form of forgiveness; it’s the only vengeance and the only punishment too. Because if my counterparts see that I’m still thinking about them, in some ways I become their servant, and if I forget them I don’t. I think that forgiveness and venegeance are two words for the same substance, which is oblivion.
- Jorge Luis Borges in the last interview before his death, when asked if he had forgiven the Peronists
Write a list poem or outline a curriculum for an ars oblivionis, or what Hyde calls “an art for loosening the hand of collective thought.” I say list but I also mean an incantation, a curse, an injunction, a recipe, an instructional, a collect, a liturgy…..
Although Hyde doesn’t touch on this, I kept thinking of haunted houses as both signifiers and narrative modes in pop culture and mythology. The entertainment of haunting, it’s consumption as a form of estrangement during Halloween. Some of us want to be haunted by what has been lost. Some of us settle for hauntedness generated as play, as distance rather than proximity.
7.
What gaps feel like open wounds? What faces exist in the gaps? What books from childhood carried a sense of something left undone that might be mistaken for nostalgia? How does duty taste when you are alone in a room saturated by its enormous disquietude?
In this same key, there is Eugenia Ginzburg writing from inside Soviet prison, notes the fears and worries and internalized trauma of family culture; no family culture leaves its children unmarked. What did yours do that makes it hard to trust the world to believe it's kindness to accept its kisses? How did school culture support or subvert family culture? Think about the tribalism of school, the scars, the risk of speaking out against friends who are bullying others. The sadism of unthinking, regurgitative nostalgia, a portrait of a politician or history teacher.
8.
Repetition as a formal mechanism for re-membering. A mode for piecing back together, gathering as verb form of togethering, or calling as summons for memory—calling my mama’s name again and again in the hopes of retrieving her scent, the brisk kindling of her laughter lighting the hallway, the illuminated manuscript of her voice, her mouth, her flesh.
9.
On the syntax of amnesia—the unreliable narrator repeating the memory back—and how vulnerable we are to being brainwashed. To being fooled. To having a memory of delight transformed by the retrospective gaze of others.
Thinking about how this plays out in national myths or even college sports fanning—to forget or step back from these myths is seen as treason. To question these myths is to be “a bad sport” at best. To stare at the worship of football coaches critically is to see Tommy Tuberville rising to power in Alabama, riding the coattails and power of that inviolable mythos.
How does this syntax play out in commercial events and valorizations? Our lives are buyable. We shop for churches. The market will provide newer and better forms. Memory marketed as nostalgia; terror reduced to more suspense; to melodrama. I think there is so much to write in this ephemera, and I feel like Walter Benjamin’s Arcade Projects attempted to give form to the juxtapositions of public ennui and distraction during times of social crisis. One could arcade this pandemic, this neo-fascist moment, this pressure to continue “working” and normalize a daily mass-death from a virus so that later experts can say “it was inevitable.” (To note how many experts say things are inevitable is to note, perhaps, that experts have conflicts of interest between saving lives and sustaining capitalist systems.)
10.
Psychologist Pierre Janet’s study of dissociative amnesia led him to propose that we think of memory not as a fixed record of the past but as a fluid event, an ongoingness: “Memory …. is an action; essentially, it is the action of telling a story.” One of Janet’s patient could not incorporate the shock of her mother’s death into the rest of her personal life-story. She could not make it part of a living narrative. For Janet, this patient could not really “be said to have a memory…it is only for convenience that we speak of it as a traumatic memory,” since the act of re-membering was absent.
Tomas Transtromer’s poem, “About History” (translated by Alice Fulton):
Every problem cries in its own language.
Go like a bloodhound to where the truth has trampled.
And, from my notebook: "Poetry is the language the dead use to help us forget they are dead," said Valzhnya Mort (whose surname means death in multiple Latin languages.)
[Addendum]
And so I end with the words of others, the ways in which they read Hyde’s collage, the virtual community of readers and thinkers in the world who encounter a book with the urge to speak of it to paper…
Hyde’s “associative collage” of fragmentary stories, meditations and recollections turns on this paradoxical relation between memory and forgetting. Perhaps the most intriguing and original argument of the book is that forgetting is an essential condition for imaginative as well as political freedom. Imaginative freedom has been Hyde’s abiding theme since the publication of his now classic 1983 study The Gift, which made the case for the infinite generosity of a “gift economy” of art against the pinched rivalries of a market economy. [Josh Cohen’s review]
Hyde describes A Primer for Forgetting as “a thought experiment seeking out places where forgetting is more useful than memory,” so the deployment of this hijacked historical memory might seem curious, as it militates against Hyde’s thesis. But Hyde is always an honest broker of ideas. An open-hearted interdisciplinarian who traces arguments across anthropology, history, poetry, and other fields… [Sebastian Stockman’s review]