Lewis Hyde - Remembered Forgotten
APA: Hyde, Lewis (2019). A Primer for Forgetting: Getting Past the Past. Farrar, Strauss and Giroux.
Link: https://worldcat.org/en/title/1222828730
page 307 (posted 2019-11-05):
"Remembered"/"forgotten": the terms are so binary! What name shall we give these little elephants of mental life, these traces of perception that are present but not present, noticed but not noticed? ... They are like letters received but not yet opened, their content available to the invisible weaver of dreams because never exposed to the domesticating force of habitual thought.
page 3 (added 2023-08-28):
Many years ago, reading about the old oral cultures where wisdom and history lived not in books but on the tongue. I found my curiosity aroused by one brief remark. "Oral societies," I read, keep themselves "in equilibrium ... by sloughing off memories which no longer have present relevance."
notes made January - March 2026
page 83 resistance:
Years ago I read a book on dreams by a Jungian therapist. What I remember is the idea that resistance is worth paying attention to; there is often a good reason to resist.
page 84 habit and automation:
and automation and AI
and the averaging of thinking into a kind of intellectual Muzak
page 103 "organized forgetting":
The notion of propaganda as an "organized forgetting", and the Muslim man speaking "like a true
modernist: ... The crude new cosmopolitanism of Lhasa was ... part of his liberation."
And is our own "crude new cosmopolitanism" being generated by social webs liberating? Or, not so much?
page 115 home is a daydream:
Novalis: "Philosophy is properly homesickness; the wish to be everywhere at home. "It is an understandable longing“... but it is a dangerous daydream that estranges us from the world as it is.
That is the tough nut - the world as it is, right now.
pages 117-118 restorative nostalgia:
... thinks it is possible to go home again.
The stuff of religious revivals and ethnic nationalism, it has a simple story to tell about getting back to origins and roots. Insisting on the impossible task of recreating the past, it descends into humorless cruelty.
Yikes!
page 119:
memory is an action ...
page 122 illness as a force:
Freud: treat the patient's illness as an actual force, active at the moment and not as an event in the past.
... the work is about bringing attention to the now ... creating awareness of the only time available, the present moment.
FreeAssociation: when a wave crashes on a beach there is no line between the wave and the sand; same with the past and present?
page 126 the Bion page:
A particular theory of knowledge underlies Bion's method, especially his belief that both memory and desire arise from sense impressions and the the senses cannot be trusted to tell the truth.
Two rules for analysts:
- "do not remember past sessions"
- avoid all desire, especially "desires for results, 'cure', or even understanding."
page 156 the agent of one's own recollections:
For those whose goal is an end to conflict, then, better to become intimate with the self that clings to differences. And better to forget about it. For those whose goal is an end to conflict, then, better to become intimate with the self that clings to differences. And better to forget about it.