AGAINST INSOMNIA. In an essay in the journal Nature, Graeme Mitchison and Francis Crick (one of the men who discovered the shape of DNA) once argued, “We dream in order to forget.” Each of our days is so filled with particularity, we are so swamped with sensory detail, that the mind needs some sort of filtering mechanism to sort out the trivial and retain the essential. Dreaming, Crick argues, serves this function. In fact, without some such process we would all be like the monstrous title character of Borges’s short story “Funes, the Memorious,” who is unable to forget even the smallest details of his day, so that a tree at 3:06 p.m. with the light just so on its leaves stays with him as wholly distinct from the same tree two minutes later shaded by a cloud. Funes “was . . . almost incapable of general, platonic ideas,” Borges’s narrator remarks, for “to think is to forget a difference, to generalize, to abstract.” It is required of us to forget many particular trees before we can know Tree itself. The ancients broadened the stroke, saying that it is required of us to forget entire worlds—the Age of Iron, these eons of hearsay—before we can recall to mind eternal things.
STATE-TRANSITION AMNESIA. The old mythmakers often puzzled over how a person might either preserve memory or induce forgetfulness when moving from one state of being to another, focusing usually on the transition between life and death (entering the underworld / emerging from the womb) but also on crossing the boundaries between different eras (the golden age / the Age of Iron), places (home/away), moods (rage/ equanimity), and levels of consciousness (waking/sleep).
The ancients also showed an interest in the amnesic effects of various drugs and thus of the line between sobriety and intoxication. (In Homer, we hear of nepenthe easing men’s “pains and irritations, making them forget their troubles,” and of the home-forgetting power of the lotus plant; or in China, think of the Broth of Oblivion Old Lady Mêng serves to the child about to be born.)
Nowadays, we might frame the boundary effects of such transitions in terms of “state-dependent memory,” the idea being that memories drop away as we move from one state of being to another but can then be recovered when we move back. In the folklore 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
