The Possibilities of Forgetting

I’m taking a class on forgetfulness later this morning. Not that I need much help because I’m already getting better and better at it. Over these years of my mid-60’s, I’m noticing a natural loosening of my mind. I still care about everything, but I can’t seem to hold it all quite so tightly. Mostly, this feels good, as I can’t contain enough details in my head to worry quite as much as I used to. But sometimes it’s a little inconvenient and embarrassing.

I read a wonderful book last year about forgetting. I’d like to look up my notes on the book this morning, but I can’t remember who wrote it or what the title was. Let me try the old trick of waiting. These days my mind has less interest in performing on command. Synapses need to warm up a little—to do a few stretching exercises and jogging in place—before they’re ready to fire up and go looking for that book or word or thing I’m trying to locate.

Sometimes I have to find another path to the destination. When one word is lost for the moment, usually there is another nearby that will suffice. It’s an odd feeling. Familiar terrain shifts and is suddenly askew in the tiniest way—a gap or bit of fog appears in an area that used to be quite unambiguous. Life used to be fully continuous, or so I like to imagine. Now there are clearly patches in the continuum that are slightly frayed or missing altogether. Sometimes I go around these problematic gaps. Sometimes I just wait a few moments and terra firma reappears to cover over the missing material.

Now I remember! The book on forgetting was written by a man named Hyde. This is enough for me to look up the notes and quotes I made because I was so moved by the wisdom and insights from the book. The book is: A PRIMER FOR FORGETTING and the author is Lewis Hyde. As I look over my notes, I find a wonderful few paragraphs that I copied out in full:

         Writing about the cosmology of the Trobriand islanders, the anthropologist Susan Montague tells us that the Trobriand universe is a vast disembodied space filled with both minds and energy. Cosmic minds are all-seeing, all-knowing, and all-powerful, able to manipulate the energy of the universe toward whatever end they desire.
            But in spite of, or rather because of, these remarkable endowments, cosmic minds have a problem: cosmic boredom… they sit around bored to death or, rather, bored to life, because as it happens, they have invented a way to relieve cosmic boredom: it is to play the amusing game of life.
            To play, you must be born into a human body, and to be born as such, you must forget the fullness of what you knew and work only with what can be known through the body. A human being is someone who has abandoned the boring surfeit of knowledge so as to come alive. 

What a delightful image—that we have forgotten the fullness of what we knew in order to play the amusing game of life. Perhaps our limitations—our forgetfulness—are not the problem but rather the source. This perspective turns our fantasies of power and control upside down. Usually when I come up against evidence that I am not ruler of the universe, I am disappointed and irritated. But maybe it’s the gods, who have everything they want, who wish to incarnate as limited living beings in order to know the fullness of life.

I suspect we’ll all be continuing our study of this topic of forgetfulness as we move forward on our life journeys. As long as I remember, I’ll keep passing on whatever I learn about forgetting.