SELF
“A Perfectly Useless Concentration”
THE APHORISMS
Changes of identity call for large doses of forgetfulness.
“The Atlantic is a Lethean stream.”
Nothing can be forgotten that was not first in mind.
“One tock! and I have forgotten all I knew.”
“Make the grass grassy and the stone stony.”
“Mnemosyne is a very careless girl.”
You may visit a grave but you do not have to.
Live steeped in history but not in the past.
Liquefy the fixed idea.
“We drink light.”
THE EMPTY STUDIO. Said John Cage to the painter Philip Guston, “When you start working, everybody is in your studio—the past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and above all, you own ideas—all are there. But as you continue painting, they start leaving, one by one, and you are left completely alone. Then, if you’re lucky, even you leave.”
THE DARWIN LETTER. “Reading Darwin, one admires the beautiful solid case being built up out of his heroic observations, almost unconscious or automatic—and then comes a sudden relaxation, a forgetful phase, and one feels the strangeness of his undertaking, sees the lonely young man, his eyes fixed on facts and minute details, sinking or sliding giddily off into the unknown.
“What one seems to want in art, in experiencing it, is the same thing that is necessary for its creation, a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration,” says Elizabeth Bishop.
THE PLAIN BUN. I am about seven years old, and I have read a book containing the moral that it is better, when offered a choice of things, not to take the very best but to take something modest. I am in a bakeshop with Mrs. Brown, who offers to buy me any bun I want. There are hot cross buns with white frosting and buns studded with candied fruits, but I choose a very plain bun, much to Mrs. Brown’s surprise (and, as I eat it, to my own disappointment).
I am about ten years old. I am standing in the kitchen after school, and my mother—by the sink, in sunlight—suddenly asks me if I think she should get her hair cut. I have no opinion whatsoever on this matter, but I can tell that she wants to get her hair cut, and so I tell her that, yes, she should.
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 mark on memory.
RESISTANCE. In a dream, I have forgotten to write my term paper. I am in a seminar led by the famous professor C——, and I suddenly realize that it is the end of the semester and I have done absolutely nothing about the paper. I wake in the usual panic.
Reflecting on the dream of forgetting, I decide to honor the forgetful me. There must be a good reason he has not written that paper. He seems trapped under false obligation—able neither to do the task nor to deny it.
I myself am now teaching a college class. The semester is beginning as I have this dream, and now I feel sympathy for my students. Years from now, will I appear in their dreams, expecting the unfinished work? I revise my syllabus, removing three of the assignments.
A SHORT HISTORY OF HABIT. For centuries, the cultivation of habit was considered a virtue. “Habit is . . . the enormous flywheel of society,” wrote William James, approving of its stabilizing force. “It is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again.”
Not so, said Walter Pater, arguing instead for constant unique alertness, free action as opposed to automatism. And not so, said Henri Bergson, arguing that habit doesn’t produce ethical conduct, only its appearance, a steadiness not enabling but enslaving.
Whatever the reason (perhaps resistance to all that set plaster called to serve industrial production), this virtue flips over at the end of the nineteenth century, whereupon the forgetting of habits of mind becomes the thing to be desired and an inability to forget the sign of mental illness, as in Proust, circa 1910, wherein “certain victims of neurasthenia . . . present year after year the unchanging spectacle of the bizarre habits they believe, each time, they are about to shake off and which they retain forever . . . , caught in the machinery of their maladies.”
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
