forgetting iv

forgetting precedes and follows acquiring.  all possession lives in a forever womb of forgetfulness.

a newborn’s cry is a cry of forgetting, an immediate visceral recognition of loss, a scream of unmitigated authenticity, an audioholograph of life.  yet so also its laugh.  the socialized adult’s cry and laugh are but memories of this primal forgetting, melancholic replicas, brief resort vacations in the long winter of culture.

a master of the art of forgetting is given to accusations – expert, populist, arcane, articulate, pompous, ignorant – of heresy, obnoxiousness, socio- and psychopathologies, vast dysfunctions, diseases, all sorts, puerility, insanity, irrationality, sadomasochism, and others too numerous to name.  yet forgetting is the art that births the arts that renew the world.

what could we say of forgetting other than it is hardly the inverse of remembering but the very stuff of vitality, the highlighting, union, and diffusion of opposites, blurred and blurring hearts?

forgetting is the living art of death and if one would begin an apprenticeship of forgetting one would begin with the techniques, materials, subterfuges, nature, and functions of death, even as an itamae must spend years mastering rice.

those experienced in forgetting are desolate, though not from any specific condition or event – this less because they have forgotten, more because forgetting grows most naturally and verdantly in the desert.

forgetting is nothing permanent, as one must also forget forgetting.  so forgetting is a primary technique of subversion, refusing all supremacies, refusing any whole, any end or ends, platform, settling, comfort, but for a time:  as it, serving or amusing, accepts each.

just as one cannot be truly polygamous – we are presently physiologically constructed to permit ingress only between two at a time – so we are manufactured to remember (though we may remember less than we demember, metamember, para and ‘patamember) a concatenated and transient one, forgetting infinite other ones.  forgetting is our natural and perpetual state.

art is the sector of life that uses memory to present, represent, master, and remaster forgetting.

whether forgetting or memory comprise the greater part of love is a knowing that if ever known has been forgotten.

forgetting is the art of using illusion to subvert illusion.  forgetting is memory fulfilled, a primary means of celebration without lights, desolate affirmation, plays of infinite deserts.

when chuang tzu says to hui shi – look, when you asked me how i knew the fish were happy, you already knew that i knew the fish were happy … i knew it from my feelings standing on this bridge – he advocates forgetting – not any forgetting that absolutely forgets events, experiences, names, but a forgetting that forgets all the apparati (reason, logic as conclusive realms) that solidify apparati on these events, experiences, names and so remove us from these events, experiences, names in the radiance of drift and doubt, this radiance that illuminates forgetting.

forgetting iii

all true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of beggars' teeth.  so forgetting is the only path to truth, the only portal to the unspeakable.

of one being given over to being written, can it not be said, it is on the margins of the texts the human writes, passed over by the vast apparati of productive literacies … that it is an artifact of forgetting?

the arts of forgetting develop with time in ways not dissimilar to an advance of dreams, vision futures on some hallucinogenic exchange.

yes, there is a sort of stock exchange of forgetting, through which we, shareholders of obscure investments, trade our losses to unaccounted gain.

the hierarchies with which the bulk of humans move and speak perhaps are countered by the non-hierarchies of forgetting, unstaged dramas of the eternal new.

between memory and forgetting how much distance is there?  this gap – whatever it might be – and its exploration are the stuff of the question of the human.

forgetting is abdicating the confident memories of a civilization.  before this abdication may come another – of the memories of one’s self – and after yet another – of the memories of one’s species.  forgetting is a growing, infectious, and immense doubt that assumes different shapes of knowledge … assumes altered shapes less to evolve and more to continue moving.

i forget civilization (morality, culture) not to become savage (immoral, uncultured) but to forge new unknowns in spaces of nowhere.

forgetting is a misnomer for substituting – one memory for another, one artifact or name or object for another, one purpose for another, one forgetting for another.

forgetting – a set of relations, processes, techniques and movements between opposites (visible, invisible; female, male; beast, god; life, death; nature, technology; rich, poor) – has a manual for its operations held in liminal spaces, these spaces prime real estate of desire.

forgetting the future is easier than forgetting the past, which is why we simultaneously neglect and romanticize it.  such ease is not for the apparent and false reason – that the future hasn’t ostensibly occurred – but because the future is more comprised of forgetting.  forgetting advances with time.  how can it not, with time so addicted to obese purposes?

the relations of forgetting and movement are hardly explicated.  to devote one’s life to moving is to forget even forgetting, and the well-enculturated old are unable to forget forgetting for they hardly move and thus are mired in memory, which is to say – fens of forgetting.

as a sage once said, one hardly has to stir to know the world.  yet to have once said this with any substance one must have first used mind’s immensity to travel extensively.  and a core technology of such use is incarnate forgetting as a practice.

forgetting ii

homo sapiens is not a machine or device for producing recognitions of the human, but instead a machine or device for producing modalities of not recognizing – it is (as far as we can tell) the first fleshed modality of forgetting.

the web expresses the paradoxical coincidence of reciprocal blindness.  technology as ecstatic trance.  the created as a forgetting to remember.

technology is mysticism – mysticism commonized, globalized, reflected, affordable, redeemed through metal, sleepless, improvable, systematized, visible, accepted and acceptable, light, sensuous.  in short, a sleight of hand, for mysticism does not appear as these things.  mysticism does not appear.  technology is a collective magic trick of a species, a longed-for ruse.

technology is a collective human creation to remember forgetting.

if mysticism is the void behind poetry, poetry the void behind language, language the void behind the human, and the human the void behind mysticism, what is technology?  might it be the movement of this circle, the circle itself, expansions and contractions of the circle to a sphere through ruach, the sphere itself?  might technology be the machine of forgetting what is behind and the drive to expand the circle so as to prolong the meeting ahead of what has been forgotten?

it is not as if memory is simply being increasingly externalized beyond sarcous surfaces, but that its diameter is being stretched while it is equally being internalized within such surfaces:  at one point – the unseen collective black hole of interiority; at the other – vast diffused exteriority; in between – the elasticity – the human.  interiority the lost and sought memory of origins, of myth and time now recycled through factories and apparati of historical reconstructions, recreations, resuscitations; exteriority the relational facticities of which the internet and its techno-meteorological formations are the most obvious.  and so of the human?  isn’t the human neither point nor point, but an experiment in cosmological pliability, the between among points of opaque, infinite, and gaseous memories?   the human may hold nothing itself, but may only be this stretching.  memory may be a function of divine interiority and technological exteriority, the human only necessary to provide currency – that is, transmission – for it.  so from plato’s alphabetic fears to our modern post-apocalyptic dramas, there has been no necessary devolution in human capacity:  it has always and equally depended on centers and extremities, interiorities and exteriorities – the only issue being the mass the human negotiates (regardless of its loci).  what sort of risks does this bulk – its possible increase – present to the human?  this rephrasing (recontextualization) of plato’s concern, made possible by technology, shifts the ground from the qualitative to quantitative concerns … through the shifting, the tectonic linguistic-cultural disasters and displacements, the negotiations and fears, the human clings to its betweens:  the human, which may be nothing more than incarnate forgetting, this eternal between.

forgetting i

forgetting is not the opposite of memory, but memory’s vitality and operations.

we say a primary function of technology is to help us remember – but, truly, its far greater function is to help us forget.

a crisis of humanity is its historic overdependence on natality to perform its chief creative – and so intelligent – function:  forgetting.

forgetting is directly proportional to truth in a similar manner to truth being directly proportional to loss and darkness.

forgetting and time are less related through death, as humanity has been inclined, and more through emptiness, of which death is but a simulation.

forgetting is a primary portal of truth – hardly of words, hardly even of knowledge, for truth’s portals are misnamed in the marketplace and one passes by means of the arts of diminishment.

forgetting is not an act of denial – which is a counterbalance and force of memory – but an ascent of affirmation, an ascent of neither balance nor force.

are you running away again? a neighbor asks me as i head out.  i never run away but only towards, i say.  such is a call and response of forgetting.

forgetting, like unlearning, like love or art, is a path forward that seems to lead backwards.

time is a child of forgetting and volition; let go of volition to forget blood’s thorny strictures and pour into one’s empty self.

time changes, but not readily.  so the migration from solar-lunar time to digital-clock time has been bumpy, slow, bloody, with the sun and moon still there, awkwardly, in the artificial sky.  forgetting in a technological age is digital.

analog forgetting is magical but digital forgetting is factual; nevertheless, each is an equal mode of time, with its own possibilities and limits.

collective forgetting embraces and is embraced by – an embrace of living death, eros’ animate skeleton – individual forgetting.  in this embrace, original and reproduction transmogrify into one another, authenticity and simulation, being and seeming, forgetting and returning.

forgetting is an oubliette, a secret dungeon reached only through a trapdoor.  the seen stage is public and sanctioned memory, but the purchased and articulate drama is sustained by the powers of forgetting, that which is often called negligence or irresponsibility by the ostensible powers.

a given society’s configuration of memory and forgetting reveals more about concentrations of energy than any worth that might have become sacred in these configurations.

forgetting is a letting go of grasping, an un-getting, a slipping of named power, a losing from and of mind, a failing of force and story.  forgetting is renewal, protest, a way out.

forgetting is the oblivion we distantly remember, the newness, fear and awe that are a periodic table of alchemical elements of our desire.

i no longer remember – i allow emptiness to remember on my behalf:  more efficient, yes, but also – more precise.