now translate it as a promise “to forget the unforgettable”—a contradiction in terms unless, that is, we add the distinction just made between symbolic action (thought, speech, writing) and actual action (for example, acts of revenge). Athenians swore to forget about “recent misfortunes” in terms of action, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t speak or write about them.
In fact, as the legal scholar Adriaan Lanni has pointed out, the amnesty was quite leaky when it came to the actual airing of grievances, especially in court cases about matters wholly unrelated to the civil war. Athenian courts had neither judges as such nor lawyers, cases being heard by randomly selected juries of several hundred adult male citizens. In addressing the jury, litigants were allowed to bring up all sorts of evidence that we would now think of as irrelevant or prejudicial: how the accused treated his parents, for example, or—to the point here—how he had behaved during the tyranny. Amnesty did not mean amnesia or silence; gossip and shaming proceeded heartily outside the prohibition on litigation directly related to civil war crimes. The amnesty worked in part because there was a way for grief and anger to be spoken even as everyone swore to forget about actual action. Speech was the charm deployed against the incarnate violence of the unforgettable.
“ACTS OF OBLIVION” was the name given in later centuries to grants of amnesty such as, for example, the 1560 Treaty of Edinburgh, signed after Reformation hostilities in Scotland (“All things done here against the laws shall be discharged, and a law of oblivion shall be established”) or the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia signed at the close of the Thirty Years’ War (“There shall be . . . a perpetual Oblivion . . . of all that has been committed since the beginning of these Troubles.” All “shall be bury’d in eternal Oblivion”).
Sometimes those who would not forget “the recent misfortunes” were threatened with punishment. Upon the restoration of Charles II to the throne, the 1660 Act of Oblivion levied fines upon anyone who, for the next few years, “presume[d] maliciously,” in speech or in writing, “to revive the Memory of the late Differences.” Things were even tougher in the British colonies. After Protestants rebelled against Maryland’s Catholic proprietor, the 1650 Act of Oblivion singled out all whose “reviling speeches” might disturb “the Amity desired” and threatened them with “any one or more of these”: imprisonment, fines, banishment, pillory, and whipping.
THE PHILTRUM. In Jewish legend, the Angel of the Night, Laïlah, places the fertilized soul of a child in the womb and, kindling a light so the soul can see the world from end to end, teaches it about the just and the wicked, those who follow the Torah and God’s commandments and those who do not. When it comes time to be born, the angel lightly strokes the child’s upper lip, leaving a small indentation. Immediately, the newborn forgets all it has seen and learned and comes into the world crying.
BABBLE. The prattle of babies displays an amazing range. The linguist Roman Jakobson writes that the babbling infant voices phonemes “which are never found within a single language or even a group of languages—consonants of any place of articulation, palatalized and rounded consonants, sibilants, affricates, clicks, complex vowels, diphthongs, etc.” During their age of “tongue delirium,” infants are capable of uttering “all conceivable sounds.”
Then comes the fall into language, the “passing over . . . to the first acquisition of words.” In order for there to be intelligible speech, there must be “stable phonemes . . . capable of becoming impressed on the memory.” All the rest of the polyphonic natal tongue must not be so impressed, must be dropped. The forgetting that is birth does not end the day the baby is born, but continues until the inborn font of phonemes has been sluiced into the narrow flow of local speech.
FOLDING LAUNDRY ON THE PLAINS OF LETHE. The retirement community had an arrangement with a day care facility where Father could leave Mother so that he could have some time to himself.
One of the facility’s tricks for engaging the demented was to set them to work folding laundry. Mother stood at a table with a large basket of dry wash before her, folding the sheets, folding the towels.
“WATERS NO VESSEL CAN CONTAIN.” Much of the mythological material offered so far presents memory and forgetting together, sometimes as twinned or equal powers, though more often with memory placed above forgetting as the thing to be valued and sought. Moreover, by “memory,” the old stories don’t mean what we mean today. Mythological memory refers not to mundane recollection (what happened yesterday or last year) but to the mind’s awareness of eternal truths. In Hesiod, memory brings the golden age to mind; in Plato, memory recalls the ideal forms; even with the mixed waters of Trophonios’s oracle, it is the Waters of Memory that help the petitioner to keep in mind the oracle’s prophetic insight. Often, then, forgetting is a falling away from the ideal, a falling into birth and into time.
And yet, if we are seeking out those situations in which forgetting is more useful than remembering, it’s worth flagging places where the old stories themselves suggest that troubles follow if memory triumphs at the expense of forgetting. Nothing good happens when unforgettable Furies make revenge the ideal you can’t get out of your head. Or when memories of injury stoke an endless civil war. Or when the dead never drink the Water of Solace and the living know no end to grief. Or when, as with Borges’s sleepless Funes, no detail of daily life is too trivial to let go of. By implication, if forgetting is a fall into birth and time, then a pure, triumphant memory will mean an end to emerging life and a fixing of time, everything stuck just where it is (stuck, we might say, in those eternal, unchanging forms).
As much as memory is to be valued and sought, there is clearly some limit. Only some right relationship between the two powers can assure constant rebirth and the liquefaction of time. True, when time flows, we are in the world of sickness, old age, and death, but we are also in the world of fertility, new life, and fresh action, and it is these that call for an allowed forgetting. In Plato’s myth of Er, the man returned from the dead says that souls soon to be born must drink from the river Lethe, “whose waters no vessel can contain.” What exactly are those waters? Perhaps they are life itself, for life is a thing no vessel can contain. Every body it inhabits will in time be broken. These are one and the same, the waters of life and the waters of forgetfulness. To be born is to be stripped of all atemporal knowledge and left henceforth to know this world through that time-bound mortal vessel, the human body.
THE UNDERWORLD NOW. In a modern, secular world, how are we to understand those old stories about the landscape through which the souls of the dead must travel? Suppose we do not believe that the soul survives the body, that it makes a journey, that it will be born again? Are all the old tales empty, then, disposable? Or can we bring them forward, translated into a current tongue?
One way might be to say that the forgetting that belongs to state-transition amnesia, as I’ve called it, is suffered not by the newly dead but by the newly bereaved who struggle to hold the dead in mind, only to find their memories eroded as they cross into that new state of being known as mourning. Slowly the tide of tears thins the substance of the past.
Another way might be to say that the old stories are not about life after death but about life after sleep. Every night we travel through the underworld, and in the morning we will have to see what has been discarded and what preserved from the day just passed, which dreams are remembered and which forgotten, and what training there is for those who wish to take the path of artful sorting, forgetting, and remembering in a useful way.
Or perhaps a night-and-day cycle is too long. Let us say that the self is reborn with every breath we take, that it is constantly dropping away and coming into being as conditions alter. Every human thirst draws us toward the waters of forgetfulness and the waters of memory, and the old stories tell us that there is schooling as to how to quench our thirst such that the voice might speak with bardic authority. Between every in-breath and every out-breath, there is the underworld with its various waters. The ghostly cypress that the Orphic poets sang about is not in the future. It is right in front of you.
