be swept upward again, his feet darting first out of the same opening. The priests would set him on the Chair of Memory, where, paralyzed with fear and unaware of himself and his surroundings, he would speak what he had seen and heard. Then he would be given over to his relatives, who would care for him until he recovered the ability to laugh.
The two waters of Trophonios’s oracle differ from those of the Petelia tablet and other Orphic poems giving instruction to the dead. In the Orphic case, a choice has to be made: forgetfulness must be avoided, memory alone offering a path out of this world. In the case of this oracle, on the other hand, the two waters appear in a sequence and are complementary, not contradictory. They bespeak the conjoining or the ambiguity of Forgetting/Not-Forgetting, Covering/Discovering, Lethe/Aletheia, each power inseparable from and shadowed by the other. Supplicants do not choose between the two but instead become vessels in which the waters are held in a single solution.
What is the sign or the mark of those who have drunk that blend of Memory and Forgetting? Here it is laughter.
BADMINTON. “One who has perfected himself in the twin arts of remembering and forgetting is in a position to play at battledore and shuttlecock with the whole of existence,” says Søren Kierkegaard.
APOPTOSIS. As the human embryo develops, its organs are shaped by a process known as “programmed cell death.” Two flipper-like appendages turn into hands as the cells between the fingers die off, separating the digits. Sometimes the cells just fall away, and at other times they are devoured by other cells, there being at least two forms of natural cell death—autophagy, or self-eating, and apoptosis, from the Greek for the “dropping off” of petals from flowers or leaves from trees. Both of these must be distinguished from the cell death that results from traumatic wounds, disease, or old age. Trauma simply damages the body, whereas programmed cell death carves useful organs and tissues out of otherwise undifferentiated flesh. It is a shaping force, an aesthetic force.
Normal forgetting is the programmed cell death of mental life. It winnows the day. It shapes experience into a useful story.
MÍMIR’S SKULL. All-Father Odin, leaving one of his eyes as a pledge, acquired his ancestral knowledge and runic wisdom by drinking the waters that bubble up in Mímir’s spring at one of the roots of the World Tree, the great ash Yggdrasil. The giant Mímir (the name means “memory”) guards that spring, and he too “is full of ancient lore” for having drunk its waters. Some of the Norse stories have it that Mímir was decapitated in a battle with the Vanir but that Odin kept the head alive with herbs and magic 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
