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.
