Fuhgedaboutit!
We’re talking to Lewis Hyde about the usefulness of forgetting—all kinds of forgetting. Listen today at 2 pm on WBUR or anytime on our website.
Lewis Hyde is his own kind of writer; it seems like he’s read almost everything, and like he can write about everything. You can find that scope in his earlier books, like The Gift or Trickster Makes this World, and it’s definitely there in the book that brought him to talk to us this week: A Primer for Forgetting.
We’re usually encouraged to remember, and so we strive to remember, then we feel bad about ourselves when we don’t remember. But Hyde is here to tell us that it’s sometimes okay to forget, or necessary, even, for improved memory. Peace of mind comes when you remember the past so carefully you can forget about it, he says. Getting past the past starts with truth: you need to know what happened. Then comes Justice: if crimes were committed, people need to be punished or held accountable. Reparations follows, if possible, and then ideally some kind of Apology and Forgiveness. Forgive and Forget!
The book is organized according to aphorisms like “Every act of memory is an act of forgetting;” “To Study the self is to forget the self;” “Live steeped in history but not in the past;” and “Forgetting is a formalist art.” Each (and loads more) leads down rabbit holes of discovery.
Hyde has a shorthand for what should be—indeed must be—remembered (The Civil War) and what’s okay to forget (the War of 1812), and he’s constructed his own imaginary Museum of Forgetting.
Meanwhile, everyone who’s visited Bryan Stevenson’s actual monument to lynching in Montgomery, Alabama, agrees that it’s affecting as a marker of one of the darkest stories in America’s past.
In the memorial pavilion, there are hanging columns, one for each county in which African-Americans were lynched, and the names are inscribed on these columns. The counties involved have been invited to take their column back and erect it as part of the public memory of what happened. Lewis told us he wrote and asked if anyone had taken any columns yet, and at that point, nobody had.
Listen: The Memory Palace
Speaking of memory palaces, We’ve plugged Nate Dimeo’s podcast in the past. Lewis Hyde reminds us that for a long time we only had oral culture and storytelling to remember the past. Nate’s palace contains multitudes of forgotten gems about Coney Island, or the swimmer Florence Chadwick, or a beloved radio station.
Listen: Hilary Hahn’s Beethoven
What do we forget when we listen to music? Or: what do we remember? You might recall scenes from movies associated with whatever you’re hearing, or maybe you’ll think of events from the past. Then again, you might forget the past entirely and think about something alien, inspired by the music. Beethoven is said to have compared music to wine, and himself to Bacchus, intoxicating listeners with sounds (and corresponding thoughts) that lead into novelty (not strictly into the past).
And so: here’s Hilary Hahn, performing Beethoven with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra; may this start you toward new achievements.
Watch: Solaris (1972)
Solaris a science fiction film that gives you time to contemplate, reconsider, reflect, and forget. Andrei Tarkovsky’s film follows a psychologist to a distant oceanic planet that somehow communicates with human consciousness. In the wreck of a space station at Solaris, this psychologist meets with manifestations of his late wife—memory and the present fuse.
The film is based on Stanislaw Lem’s novel of the same title, but Tarkovsky’s Solaris does something uniquely cinematic. It considers movement that doesn’t particularly progress. The film is set in a labyrinthine, cluttered, bogged down station station, populated by entrapped characters circling around their pasts. And so it’s a world made by a specific sort of remembering vs. forgetting—a place suitable for exploring how we can’t fully untangle present from past.
Read: Lydia Davis’s Translation of Proust
In our conversation, Lewis Hyde mentions Proust’s greatest work, whose title is sometimes translated as Remembrance of Things Past, sometimes as In Search of Lost Time. The famous scene at the start of this epic novel involves the protagonist eating a madeleine, the small baked treat, which then initiates associations that sustain the narrator’s reflections on time, on how we imaginatively make our way through time based on how we encounter the world of sensation.
Here’s Lydia Davis’s translation of madeleine-eating in Swann’s Way, the first volume of Remembrance of Things Past. Sense experience — the eating of the madeleine — is rich with potential here. It brings together new meanings, times, ideas, and emotions:
[M]echanically, oppressed by the gloomy day and the prospect of a sad future, I carried to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had let soften a piece of madeleine. But at the very instant when the mouthful of tea mixed with cake-crumbs touched my palate, I quivered, attentive to the extraordinary thing that was happening in me. A delicious pleasure had invaded me, isolated me, without my having any notion as to its cause. It had immediately made the vicissitudes of life unimportant to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory, acting in the same way that love acts, by filling me with a precious essence: or rather this essence was not in me, it was me.
This Week’s Ephemeral Library:
See the film based on Lewis Hyde’s The Gift, screening at Amherst Cinema this monday, with the director Robin McKenna present. Why Russiagate was Never the Answer. Amber A’Lee Frost (of Chapo fame) on Why the Left Can’t Stand The New York Times. (Like our beloved host, Frost has trashed her Times subscription and reads the FT instead). The best take yet on the 23 and Me Dems: Matt Taibbi on The Iowa Circus.
Must Read: John Lanchester on The Case for Universal Basic Income. The first paragraph is worth quoting: the history of the last 20 years in a hundred words or so:
The broad outline of 21st-century history, its first couple of decades anyway, is starting to become clear. A period of credit-fuelled expansion and runaway financialisation ended with an abrupt crash and an unprecedented bank bailout. The public’s reward for assuming the bankers’ losses was austerity, which crippled the recovery and led to an interminable Great Recession. At the same time, increasing automation and globalisation, and the rise of the internet, kept first-world wages stagnant and led to an increase in precarity. Elites did fine, and in the developing world, especially Asia, economies grew, but the global middle class, mainly located in the developed world, felt increasingly anxious, ignored, resentful and angry. The decades-long decline in union power made these trends worse. The UK had its longest ever peacetime squeeze on earnings.1 In response to this the political right played one of its historically most effective cards — Blame the Immigrants — and achieved a string of successes from Brexit to Trump to Orbán to Bolsonaro to Salvini and the AfD, succeeding in normalising its new prominence to such an extent that a quasi-fascist party scored 34 per cent in the French presidential elections, which were nonetheless hailed as a triumph for the ‘centrist’ winner.
That’s all for this week folks. Thanks for the memories, and don’t forget your pals at Open Source — send us a note, an idea, or even 5 bucks.
The OS Squad
