the forgettery

 The forgettery

1

The first time I thought of the forgettery – thought of forgetting as an active organ in my body and experience – I was on a bus in Austin Texas. What I was thinking of before, what I did afterwards, what my stop was, what my day’s purpose was – these I don’t know. These have been blanked out, and I only know they existed by inference, with myself, my living self, as the inferable remnant. But I do remember thinking: forgettery!

I remember that I thought I’d have to remember that name.

We do have amnesia. Yet amnesia is a medical name, a name for a disorder. The forgettery is not a disorder, any more than the shadow you cast is a disorder.

Having thought of this term, having in one moment connected the forgettery to the memory as an indissoluble bond, I rather forgot about it. At intervals, though, I would remember it. When the internet came alive, and the meme became something other than a Dawkins neologism, I sometimes thought: I need to meme forgettery. When I die, maybe I could be remembered by a grateful posterity for meming forgettery.

But my delusions of grandeur on this account would stumble over my sense of the ridiculousness of my delusions of grandeur, and so it happened that the forgettery has fallen, a still birth meme, on the ungrateful world.

2.

In my experience, memory has two directions. That is, when I remember, the direction memory seems to take is either straight, direct, or lateral. In the former case, I am like a fisherman casting a line – I cast my mind back and hook my object, that thing or event in the past. Or I don’t. When I don’t, it means I have either forgotten it or it didn’t exist. Psychologists have shown that it is a rather simple matter to create fake memories, in which case what was never there is remembered anyway. But regardless of whether the object is absent, non-existant, or forged, the direction of memory, here, is direct. It is analogous to double book accounting, where the column with the object and the column with the memory are on one plane, side by side. Lateral memory, however, is a different thing. It is about connotations and associations. Memory here is something that emerges without, at times, my having made any effort to remember. I will, instead, suddenly remember. This suddenness has something of the character of waking up – it speaks of two very different states of consciousness. And yet, just as I can wake up feebly, and fall back to sleep, so too I can suddenly recall a thing and then it will slip away. I will forget what I just remembered, or rather, the memory that was forced upon me. If it was something that I wanted to note down, or something that I remember in the moment of remembering that I was supposed to remember, I’ll mentally rummage around. The direct method here fails me, because though I can directly remember the event of suddenly remembering, the object here, the event, is wrapped around something I’ve forgotten. To find that content, I often resort to association – to trying to construct what I was doing when the sudden memory hit me. Or, having a sense of what the content of this sudden memory was – having it on the tip of my tongue – I’ll try to find associates with it – I’ll play a sort of guessing game.

For instance: let’s say I am trying to recall the sum total of my experiences with Leonard Cohen’s The Stranger song. I’d have to recall putting the album, Songs of Leonard Cohen, on the bulky fake wood stereo my parents bought at some fortunate point when I was twelve or thirteen, a purchase that informed my entire musical life. I would have to take a memory glimpse at that stereo, which had sliding panel doors underneath the record player – needle combination to provide an album height space in which I stored my albums, it being the case then that music on an album was optimally preserved by putting the album upright although now that I think of it why an album would lose its definition if it was stacked on its side is beyond my knowledge of vinyl. In any case, I would have to think about the storing of albums, how they lean thinly one against the other, how they might be sorted by name or something. I would have to think of album art, which at one time had an importance that is now entirely fabulous, since it has no popular existence. It exists now as a small icon on a screen. I would have to remember the album, where I purchased it – without doubt some pre-Walmart emporium on Memorial Drive, one of which was actually named Treasure Island – and the way Leonard looked not at all pop on the album, with no rock n roll glamor, but rather pleasingly like some poet in some fabulous coffeehouse I could only dream about, not knowing that in thirty years there would be franchise coffeehouses in every hick burg.

And I’d have to remember that I did, over time, get by heart the words of that long long song. Then, the first time I saw McCabe and Mrs. Miller, which begins with the Warren Beatty character, in a bearskin coat, riding on a horse through the wilderness – a vision and a sound that shot through me and gave me, and still gives me, the sense of an expanded existence in the wilds of America, a sense that has always remained with me and makes me, in spite of the old tired racisms and idiocies that issue from that country continually, know the country in terms of a crush I will probably never get over. I would have to think about how I instantly recognize the guitar fingerings that introduce that song, which I believe was the first song on the second side – unless that was the Master Song. I’d have to remember the distinct small scratch of putting the needle on the groove that starts that song, that static which after a while becomes part of the song itself. This is of course a teen memory, the teen slowly dying over the years until it is a mere whisp, like a dead warrior in the Greek afterlife, a summonable being. And then the memory would have to take on my singing of that song, which I have done frequently, especially when driving a car or riding a bicycle – which to me are occasions for singing to myself. More than a shower, a shower is a more pensive adding up things I have to do experience. And this singing would bring up travels – for instance, driving from Atlanta to Santa Fe. And so on.

This kind of lateral memory structures, if given its full power, the memory dream with its suddenness and its frustrations as to the exact details of the remembered and its narrative pulls and pushes. The memory dream is like that thing which, I feel, is fading in our over-media mediated lives, the daydream. The daydream requires an inwardness that is too quickly made into an outwardness on Instagram and tik tok. The usual academic way of saying this is that it is “commodified”, which touches on one facet of it, but not on other facets – for instance, the loss, over the boundaries of the commodified item, of a certain childhood hope. The death of utopia on the screen, so to speak.

3.

To return to the forgettery – it is most present as an actual faculty when one is engaged in the memory dream. Like a magician pulling item after improbable item from his top hat. Here’s the stereo in the living room in Clarkston Georgia, here’s the album reappearing in my brother Dan’s collection of albums in one of his apartments in the metro Georgia area, here’s the day I rode in the rain on a ratty bike up the slope of Mount Bonnell in Austin Georgia, singing the song in my most self-pitying voice as I wondered how my life had led to this moment, and so on. I can’t, honestly, place that bike – where did I get it? Was this the bike that the editor of the Austin Chronicle book page gave me after he had been enlightened by a peyote vision in Northern Mexico? Or was that after?

4.

Oh, the forgettery. Some day you will have my all.