On forgetting

 

Any document entitling itself 'on forgetting' ought to start with a dot dot dot.

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I have noticed that in speaking, I often experience – my age, my it, experiences -a moment of de-concentration. It is as if my mind wanders away from a noun or, especially, a proper name. Forgetting a name is a basic politeness mistake – when I speak to X, if I forget X’s name, some taboo in the tribe of Ego and Id is touched upon. I feel embarrassed, as if I made some blunder, as if flummoxing my part in the ritual. Even though X doesn’t know what is happening under my facial expression, I feel that X is “feeling” me. Projection? Or is this the everyday ESP of our meet and greet that I am boggling. At the same time, I can remember the most esoteric of names – I remember, for instance, Sieur Lahontan, an obscure French explorer. But the name Ruth, or Jack, or Jill, will sometimes, tantalizingly, slip through the gaps.

This leads to one of those aging things: the memory revery. The X encounter might be long gone, the night will be upon us with its star and moonwork, and I will be following the clues, like Sherlock Holmes on a case, that will hopefully lead me to X’s name.

 

The routes of memory, the stimulus that creates the remembered content – a name, a date, a past certainty – becomes, as you get older, more hazardous to travel down – parallel to your skill at, say, driving a car, which also is a matter of going down routes, streets, judging distances, making turns, stopping at the lights, ignoring certain stimuli, picking up other. The speed of life within me is such that these blanks occur, as if there were suddenly too much light coming through the windshield – or too much darkness. In the heart of too much light, as your eye knows, is the pitchiest pitch. I have lived among words with a self-proclaimed affinity for them, for writing them down, for  taking them and making them do rhythmic and semantic things; when simple names escape me, I wonder if I got my life’s purpose wrong on that long ago day when I decided to become a writer. On the other hand, the scale of these defeats is not large. How often am I going to need the word “risotto”, for instance, a word that somehow keeps disappearing from my lexicon? It is not the key to my heart – I can take or leave risotto.

 

 

What we forget, Freud thought, represented forces that make us forget: the vertiginous libido pitted against the brutal death-drive. What an arcade game the human consciousness becomes! This is, perhaps, not a bad image even for the sensualist program, long preceding Freud, in which the senses carry with them anything but certainty about the data they supposedly represent – and yet that wreck of data, that ghost of the world, is what we must cling to, like victims of shipwreck hanging on the spars that still float on the surface, waiting for rescue.

Philosophy is no rescue. I have definitely come to the sage stage in life, or retirement, whatever we want to call it, and I am beginning to suspect that the calmness of the sage is just a mask for the amnesia our biology crafts, its last little trap.