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.
page 166:
That Crown of Forgetfulness ... the way it is set against conflict, and not just any conflict but the centuries-old division between Christianity and Islam. "Ogier the Dane" is pure Orientallism, that politics of difference animating the violence of Christian imperialsim.
pages 180 - 181:
When it comes to collective memory -- the kind that calls for a national historic site -- you can't begin to remember in a way that allows you to forget until the collective itself recognizes and responds to the history at hand.
page 193:
In the alternating rhythms of memory and forgetting, it was the second generation after Franco's death that broke the pact of silence that their parents had found necessary to make the transition to democracy.
page 204: (Imre Kertész)
" We must create our values ourselves, day by day, with that persistent though invisible ethical work that will give them life, and perhaps turn them into the foundation of a new European culture."
page 205: (Ruth Kluger)
As for "the various Shoah museums," they "tell you what you ought to think.... They impede critical faculty."
page 220:
With the 1865 end of the U.S. Civil War came calls on both sides to forget the conflict as soon as possible. ... Fine, but such entreaties leave many questions unanswered. Who exactly forgets? What will they commit to oblivion, and what will they preserve? And what story will remain once that sorting is done?
page 221:
The "Lost Cause": the phrase refers in general to a set of claims about the Old South and the Civil War (that slaves were happy, ... that an avaricious industrial North destroyed a genteel, organic civilization), but in specific the phrase refers to the claimed autonomy of individual states, their freedom from federal interference.
page 224: (Frederick Douglass)
The American people are "destitute of political memory," Douglass once said, "We are more likely to forget too soon, than to remember too long, the history of the American conflict with slavery."
page 229:
If national identity presumes collective forgetting, thenthe struggle over how to remember the Civil War poses a question: What form shall the abstraction "the United States of America" take?
page 231:
But of course to speak of mutual enemies is a displacement of antagonism rather than its transcendence.
And transcendence is what is needed for the kind of forgetting that amounts to freedom from history.
page 233:
If, in the psychology of individuals, unresolved traumatic memories present themselves symptomatically (as obsessions, acting out, ... nightmares, ....) does something similar hold for the psychology of nations? Does unexamined history reappear in some form of collective acting out, nightmare, flashback, and so on? If so, then forced forgetting doesn't resolve or transcend a violent past but obliges it to live on by displacement.
page 252:
When we say we consign something to oblivion, we suggest simultaneously that it is to be forgotten and yet also remembered," says Søren Kierkegaard. ... I suppose that this paradox describes accurately the kind of stance to the past that make reconciliation possible: it is necessary to forget and remember at the same time.
page 268:
Psychotherapeutic work includes becoming conscious of memory's transfer habit and dropping it so as to experience more directly not just the therapist but any other person.
page 270: (Agnes Martin)
"I gave up facts entirely in order to have an empty mind for inspiration to come into .... You have to practice quiet, empty mind. I gave up the intellect entirely. I had a hard time giving up evolution and atomic theory but I managed it .... And I never have ideas myself. I'm very careful not to have ideas."
page 274:
Agnosia is not amnesia. Nothing can be forgotten that was not first in mind.
page 283:
We may think of myth as representing things from the primeval past, but a case like this shows that it is sometimes better to say that myth offers a map of present conditions, giving them authority by framing them as primeval. In a oral culture, each generation is free to reimagine its heritage in a form that matches the past to the present.
page 294:
The literary critic Barbara Johnson writes that it ws Thoreau's great gift to wake us to "our own lost losses." Not losses simply -- we all have those -- but the losses we are not even aware of. If we are ever to recover them, remembering that we have forgotten is the first step.
page 302:
.... one of Marcel Proust's great themes, the trade-off between the delight or anxiety of fresh perception and the comfort or dullness of the habitual. Habit's first duty is to help us feel at home is our surroundings, a virtue Proust readily acknowledges, call habit "that skillful, slow-moving housekeeper" .... But on the whole, he is a declared enemy of habit. Its comforts anesthesize and stupefy ....
page 305:
These essences or truths are not so much in the memories themselves as in the uncanny coincidence of past and present that points to something exclusive to neither and therefore lying outside time.
page 308:
" .... the true paradise is the paradise we have lost."