Forgetting

Forgetting

The body is a home and the head is the attic stuck way up top under the gables of the roof but above the main structure and separated by a partition of reality. Aren't attics more than just mere rooms anyhow, with their oddly angled walls and roof and their dirty corners where vague clumps of the past collect in scattered piles of dust and debris. The body's garbage: misplaced sentiment, dispensed dialogue, spent youth and all the individual memories that make and shape the view from outside the home as seen through the topmost two windows. Attics are spooky to children for reasons easily classified: darkness, cramped quarters, hidden unknowns -- a slew of similarities that could also be applied to the same metaphorical space of the head as an attic. It is a place where the parents have placed and hidden their histories: trunks bursting with yellowed papers all bearing the handwriting of Mnemosyne, lamps that lit the rooms of one's childhood, rugs that covered the dirtied floors of adolescence and the many side tables of adulthood to bang one's shins into. All this stuffed into a too-small room free from the air conditioned comfort of the rest of the house, left to sit until some kid's curiosity pokes him to explore. We find ourselves in the attics of our homes, even if the litter strewn about was left by some older inhabitant. Isn't that just history anyhow?

If the ethereal things in the head are the thoughts, then so are the cluttered contents of the attic. A person chooses how he organizes his attic: either by simply dropping and running away, or by painstakingly cataloguing each item before committing it to this quiet permanence. In this way one also sets up the process of Forgetting, which is after all the only end for all things placed up there. It's always been my understanding that forgetting is something that happens to a memory despite our efforts to keep it firmly held in place, a sort of forced cleansing of the walls of the brain brought on by a nature that won't let us be the pack rats that we want to be. This degradation of memory, if it is in fact involuntary, is as impossible to fight as Time itself. As is the case with most people, the older I get the more I start to distrust the very philosophies that organically grew with me as I age.

I think of our F, the invisible vessel to be filled with our narration, our example to force into any situation, our dear ghostly Person. Hullo, F, Hullo! Can we have you as a nineteen year old boy, please, and see you standing on the cliff of your first heartbreak? Thank you. Let's let him get his strength, we know forcing him back into a blank past is a harrowing process for all involved and let's be mindful not to stir up too much dust on our way backwards. The coloring all starts to give way, lose saturation and become more and more greyed with the past. Aha! There he is, our F, standing on the cliff of his first heartbreak.

He waves his hands in the air twice vigorously, lets them hang their paused for a moment and then lowers his hands back into the safety of his pockets. F has just had his heart broken (be it death or some other loss, or the simple dissolving of the standard relationship). We can't know the particulars of it, they matter so little, but if we train our telescopes on him and play with the focus slightly this way, now slightly that way, we can clearly see that his cheeks are stained with tears and his lips are reddening at the same time. He's concerned. F hasn't the foggiest idea what to do with all of this stuff that he has collected, each physical thing seems to be a container for a memory and each of these containers seem to pile up in front of him like a wall full of bricks, each one weighing a metric ton. Here's a shirt, just a shirt, but F now views it as more: didn't he button it or unbutton and somehow isn't that linked to his heart that is now broken? Yes, that happened to F, and he cannot seem to shake the memory from the shirt nore can he seem to shake the shirt from the memory. It is this exact confusion that creates a need. In order to instill some organization he imagines all of these items (the shoes he happens to be wearing, the blanket atop his bed, the entire contents of his medicine cabinet) being boxed up according to some predescribed categories. One column of boxes are filled with clothing, another is stacked with papers and correspondence, yet another taller one making a tower of boxes full of treasured newspaper clippings (we don't know why our F saved these). Rows upon rows of these boxes.

It occurs to F that such a huge weight will be hard to move, not to mention the fact that his attic is not quite big enough to fit everything. He decides at once to cast off some of the boxes, one two three there they go, and he is left with a slightly more manageable stack.

Now: what have we here? We have our forgetful F, on the cliff of his heartbreak, with an organized pile of boxes all of them filled with items that are intrinsically linked to some memory or another and each weighs a ton. He is a house, his feet are the basement planted deep below the surface of the earth and his head as the attic; a scary dark crowded place where he stores his history and his memories in boxes. The boxes contain as much of him as he contains of them, and at times he wonders if they are in fact more of him than he of them. Careful packing: three two one, F lumbers up the ladder with a box on each shoulder and makes his way through the spiderwebs before letting the weight off and shoving it into some corner or another. What have we here, now? We have our F, and we have his memories boxed up, and we have his decision to cast of several in order to reduce the bulk and weight of this extended experience of love, and we now have his attic overstuffed with what he has chosen to keep of the past. He's sweaty and appreciative of the sweat because he knows it means he has worked, and he is at least young enough to naively link work with reward (F cites Rilke a lot, but will grow out of that.)

By way of our made up character, we have an illustrated example of the workings of Forgetting and not only that, we also have an answer for the problem of whether or not it is forced on us or whether we force it upon ourselves. In his boxing of things, F is making decisions: "I see this. I attach to this some weight of memory. I want this memory to remain untouched so I box it. By shrouding this thing in a box I have successfully hidden it from myself, it remains as four-cornered and non-descript as the one next to it. I can, at will, open it to examine its contents or I can, at will, decide to leave it unattended for a stretch of time." His youth betrays his intelligence, F has yet to learn that some boxes open themselves completely on their own without our wishing them to --- some coincidental trigger or another might undue the tape and present the memory to us seemingly out of nowhere. Let's see him in a few years:

F has come down from his cliff and is hibernating comfortably at a more mellowed forty years of age. Since packing his boxes into his attic his life has taken several symptomatic turns that have lead him to change homes. Just as he outgrew boyhood and sprouted new needs for things like space and quiet, he's outgrown his former home yet again. Body as home: moving as growing up. F stretches his arms and has the space he could not keep clean as a kid and the quiet he could not keep safe as a younger adult, he smiles at his home: it fits him. And what of his attic? And what of his boxes? As with many moves, F has lost a few things along the way. Even with his labels, even with his care to keep them from getting rotten with mildew and moths, he has simply misplaced a few boxes. "But, if he had treated his memories properly and not boxed them up, perhaps he would not have lost them." Yes, true, however F needed the boxes in order to keep the things safe and to visually even them all out: one the same as the next --- this reduction of importance is needed to cope with the loss as well as assist in the future forgetting of the object. "If the things were not obscured the wrapping of the box, he could have seen them for what they were and kept them in a more cherished state." Yes, true, but had the things themselves been left exposed he'd have to suffer their loss each time his eye would fall on the thing. The box is needed, the box is the first part of forgetting. From one home to the next, F has moved himself and his things. He'll move again, and more things will get lost or damaged in the process. Now: what have we? A portrait of the process of forgetting from start to finish. The box takes the blame for us: it wasn't labeled right, its contents didn't seem to be of much importance, it simply wouldn't fit and had to be skipped, time took its toll via moisture and the item rotted and died, etc. A person moves and happens to lose a few things along the way, intended or not, and that is in essence exactly what forgetting is.

Out of one house and into another: we grow up and lose the garbage we thought we'd want to save, and its a relief in several ways (less clutter, less weight, less memory to keep track of). We do it to ourselves: we pick the box and store it away and maybe when we grow up and move out we look through the box and maybe decide to take it with us into the new house, or for lack of space we toss it. F stood on the edge of his cliff, and he packed up all his experiences, and he kept what were useful, and he stored the rest, and he held them close, and now and again he opened one to pine over his stupid loss, and eventually he grew up and moved out and left a few boxes behind (for the next person or for nobody in particular) and later in life he has less remembered weight than he did before. It is the accumulation through experience and the shedding of that remembered-experience via living.

And this is forgetting: a thousand boxes that diminish themselves upon growing, one by one, until all that is left is a blank body, which eventually gets put into its own box that other people will maybe keep in their own attics.