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.