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.
