her what was the worst thing about her experience: “Suddenly I looked at them all and said, the thing I hate the most about it is that it’s boring.” Time had passed, the work had been done, and she wasn’t interested anymore. The French psychologist Pierre Janet once suggested that we think of memory not as a thing fixed in the mind but as an action, “the action of telling a story,” and when it is successful, that action leads to “the stage of liquidation.” Forgetting appears when the story has been so fully told as to wear itself out. Then time begins to flow again; then the future can unfold.
TWO BURIALS. Given that the etymological root of the Greek lethe suggests that forgetting is the covering up or hiding of something, we could extend the image and say that to forget is to bury. And to differentiate some kinds of forgetting—especially in regard to trauma, both individual and collective—let us say that there are two kinds of burials: in one, something is hidden because we can’t stand to look at it; in the other, it is buried because we are done with it. It has been revealed and examined, and now it may be covered up or dropped for good. This latter is proper burial, burial after attention has been paid and funeral rites observed.
SORTING THE DEAD. Those who never receive proper burial are denied the relief of state-transition amnesia, their memories sticking to them even in death. In Virgil’s Aeneid, Aeneas travels to the underworld in search of his father. Coming to the rivers where Charon ferries the dead to the otherworld, he sees that the ferryman is refusing passage to some of the thronging souls. “What divides the dead?” he asks the Sibyl, his guide; she replies that those denied passage are the “helpless and graveless.” Charon will not carry them across the waters “until their bones have found a resting place. A hundred years they roam and flit about these shores; then only are they admitted and revisit the longed-for pools.”
IN FIJI, according to Basil Thomson, the souls of the dead, after various adventures, come to a spring and drink to forget sorrow. Why, exactly? Because the relatives of the dead in the daylight world are tired of mourning and “savage etiquette” prescribes that as long as the dead soul remembers, his relations must remember too. They find this tedious, so the shades drink the Water of Solace and the living are released.
IN ANNE MICHAELS’S NOVEL Fugitive Pieces, the parents and sister of the young Holocaust survivor Jakob Beer have been killed, but he remembers them in dreams. When he wakes, he feels a particular anguish: “the possibility that it was as painful for them to be remembered as it was for me to remember them; that I was haunting my parents and Bella with my calling, startling them awake in their black beds.”
“LET GO.” In a long 2017 Facebook post, the Diné, or Navajo, activist, artist, and ceremonial leader Pat McCabe—also known as Woman Stands Shining—explained her resistance to the call to “never forget.”
McCabe had once worked with a shamanic healer to address her serial depressions. During one session, she had a vision of living in Canyon de Chelly on Navajo tribal lands and witnessing a massacre of her people at the hands of “beings who had the appearance of humans, who were all identically dressed in blue.” Over the years, her vision kept returning until she finally sought out a place where the events might have in fact occurred—a place aptly named Massacre Cave. There she unexpectedly found herself praying.
“I began to address my ancestors. . . . I said to them, that we would love them always, and forever, but that somehow we must forget, or let go of, all of the violence that had come before now, or we ourselves would complete the job of genocide that the U.S. government began. I begged them, my ancestors, to let us go free. I told them they must find their way all the way home to the Spirit World.
“And then I prayed with all my heart, and all my tears, and asked for Creator to open the gate for them to travel, and to leave us in peace, and for them to find peace beyond the gate, and for each of us to travel in the correct way once again, each in our own world, me in this Earth Walk world and they, true ancestors in the Spirit World. I saw part of this take place, I saw them traveling in long lines out of this place and into the world beyond.”
“TEACH ME I AM FORGOTTEN by the dead / And that the dead is by herself forgot,” wrote Emerson at the age of twenty-seven, his young wife, Ellen, having died.
In his biography of Emerson, Robert D. Richardson points out that this prayer came at a turning point in Emerson’s life. He soon left his Concord home and traveled to Europe. He wanted to live again, and to do so, the boundary that separates the living from the dead must be sealed. In a case like this, “never forget” would be a deadly curse.
BLOOD AT THE ROOT. There’s something odd worth noting in Cicero’s account of the invention of artificial memory. Remember: the poet Simonides was insulted at a banquet; called away, he briefly left the banquet hall; while he was out, the roof collapsed, crushing the host and all his relations, mangling their bodies so completely that none of the corpses could be identified except by the returning poet. Simonides could recall where each guest was sitting and thus discovered, wrote Cicero, that anyone wishing to train the memory “must select localities and form mental images of the facts they wish to remember.”
What’s strange about this story going forward—for it is the beginning of a centuries-long interest in the place system of memory—is how much is made of the method and how little of those unrecognizable, oozing slabs of human flesh and bone. The “completely crushed” bodies add a memory-enhancing hook of horror to the otherwise benign localities and images.
In the rhetorical tradition, the tree of memory set its roots in blood.
AN ALTAR TO OBLIVION. If the arts of memory are rooted in blood, could there be an art of forgetting that puts an end to bloodshed?
In the Erechtheum on the Acropolis in Athens, there once stood, says Plutarch, an altar to Lethe, to Forgetfulness, meant to remind Athenians to forget a mythic dispute between Poseidon and Athena. Each god had sought to win the city’s favor with a gift, Poseidon offering a spring of salty water and Athena, the winner, an olive tree. Defeated, Poseidon did not begrudge the loss, however, but took it, says Plutarch, with “an easy-going absence of resentment.” The dispute between Poseidon and Athena supposedly took place on the second day of the last month of summer (Boëdromion), and Athenians have ever since omitted that day from their calendar. The erased date and the altar to Forgetfulness are reminders that the foundational divine discord should be left to the past, not brought forward.
ENDLESS. Perhaps all nations have their foundational discord. In the United States, it was the debate over slavery, not solved by the compromises written into the Constitution and not solved by the War Between the States. Terry Alford, author of a 2015 biography of Abraham Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth, reports that even as he was working on his book—a century and a half after the event—a custom had arisen in which people put Lincoln pennies faceup on the Booth family crypt in Baltimore, as if to seal the assassin in his grave. But others had reversed the ritual, leaving pennies with Lincoln’s face down in the alley behind Ford’s Theatre, the site of the assassination. “That Civil War,” Mr. Alford said, “is still going on.”
MIXING MYTH AND HISTORY. The Athenians omit the second day of Boëdromion from their calendar so as to remember to forget the founding discord between Poseidon and Athena. In noting this, Plutarch observed that Poseidon exceeded Thrasybulus in civic spirit, for the god agreed to bear no grudge in his hour of defeat, whereas Thrasybulus’s similar graciousness appeared only after a famous victory in a battle against tyranny.
THE TYRANNY. At the end of the Peloponnesian War, the citizens of Athens, thoroughly beaten and starving, surrendered to Sparta, whereupon the Spartans appointed thirty Athenians of oligarchic leanings to write a new constitution. But, as Xenophon tells us, the Athenians “continually delayed framing and publishing this constitution” and instead initiated a civil war against the city’s democrats
