maintain themselves in the present,thus their complexion is serene.
In Rosenberg’s own reading of these verses, the third line becomes “they nourish themselves in the present.” Such is the food of a serene self-forgetfulness. Self-making, on the other hand, feeds on time past and time to come. “The continuation of psychological time and the survival of the ego are really the same thing,” says Rosenberg.
CHANGES OF IDENTITY. “Forget your past, your customs, and your ideals,” reads a Yiddish guidebook printed in Odessa and given to Jews on their way to New York in the 1890s. The waters of the river Lethe feed directly into the oceans surrounding the American continent. Americans have always claimed the right to reinvent themselves, and all changes of identity call for strong doses of forgetfulness. Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” stands as one of our earliest odes to forgetfulness in the service of a shifting self: “Why drag about this corpse of your memory, lest you contradict something you have stated in this or that public place? Suppose you should contradict yourself; what then? It seems to be a rule of wisdom never to rely on your memory alone . . . but to bring the past for judgment into the thousand-eyed present, and live ever in a new day.”
The transcendentalists wrote their own guidebooks to the New World, eager as they were to forget European culture and establish their own. “The Atlantic is a Lethean stream, in our passage over which we have had an opportunity to forget the Old World and its institutions,” wrote Henry Thoreau in a typical passage. “If we do not succeed this time, there is perhaps one more chance for the race . . . , and that is in the Lethe of the Pacific, which is three times as wide.”
IN TIBET. In 2000, The New York Review of Books carried a report by Ian Buruma about his trip to Tibet. The Chinese have been diligently trying to wipe out the Tibetan language and culture, making it impossible for young Tibetans to study their own history, especially their religious heritage. Their efforts are a species of the “organized forgetting” that Milan Kundera described in regard to Soviet propaganda in Eastern Europe.
And yet Buruma meets a Tibetan Muslim in a restaurant for whom religion has a different meaning: in the past, as in Myanmar more recently, the Buddhists, intent on maintaining their own purity, had persecuted the Muslims such that they and Tibet’s other religious minorities view Buddhism with a sense of unease.
This Muslim turned out to be the only Tibetan with whom Buruma spoke who didn’t care about the diminishment of the Tibetan language “or the new dominance in urban areas of Chinese low life and pop culture.” This man spoke “like a true modernist. It was inevitable, he said, that traditions were hollowed out by modern life. . . . The crude new cosmopolitanism of Lhasa was . . . part of his liberation.”
The story echoes that “forget your traditions” advice given to America’s immigrant Jews. It seems to promise a secular, pluralist state that welcomes the forgetting of difference and its consequent fluid identity. In this case, it’s a false promise, of course, a swapping out of one set of differences for another, of a purely Buddhist agenda for a purely Communist one.
“KENOSIS” means an emptying out, as in Saint Paul’s charge to the Philippians: “Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in human likeness.”
To “look . . . to the interests of others” means to forget about the self that knows itself in opposition to those others, which is to say that the passage is commonly read as a teaching: self-emptying is the cure of pride. In that line, one point of the pages about tribal scarring was to say that “Lewis” is of the people who take pride in their literacy, their mastery of tools, and their intelligence. And that with such pride comes identity—identity through difference. “I” am “I” because I am not one of those who’ve never heard of a solenoid, who have no interest in Constantinople at the end of the eleventh century, who never made it to the Ivy League.
If such difference amounts to self-elevation, then kenosis calls for descent into some humbler form. On the other hand, but just as important, if difference amounts to self-debasement (“I” should be ashamed!), then kenosis calls for a move in the opposite direction, an emptying out of servitude and assumption of some less marked way of being. Either way—proud or ashamed, high or low, master or servant, literate or illiterate, smart or dumb—this emptying finally means letting go of all such oppositions. The crossroad where dualities meet and cancel each other out—that is the site of the self-forgetfulness whose consequence is the death of identity by difference. Concludes Saint Paul, “Being found in human form, [Jesus] humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross.”
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