Kyle's Files: Things To Remember About Forgetting, Being The Change, Dolly
(David Grossman, via @marysia_cc)
This is a long, long letter. Next week it will be shorter 😘
1. Tweets'n'Things™
Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds. Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (1907)
Suckers try to win arguments, non-suckers try to win. Nassim Taleb
With TV, the relationship is you're the parent and it's the child. It's in your house. It's smaller than you, you can turn it off, change it, and control it. With the movies, you're the child and it's the parent. You look up to it. It controls you and it is taking you where it wants to take you. JJ Abrams (Article)
The fact that i’m at risk of seeing a 14 year old’s opinion at any point during my day is a human rights violation @faunary (blocked) via screenshot by @writtenbyhana
See all human behaviour as one of two things: either love, or a call for love. Marianne Williamson (via DenseDiscovery)
It is 1971, and Mirek says: The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come. Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Writers like me who work very slowly are well advised to settle on topics such as these, topics whose fascination may never be exhausted. Such authors do not simply tell us what they know; they invite us to join them in fronting the necessary limits of our knowing. Lewis Hyde, A Primer for Forgetting
To secure an ideal, surround it with a moat of forgetfulness. Lewis Hyde, A Primer for Forgetting
Writings of light assault the darkness, more prodigious than meteors. Borges, Boast of Quietness
The real constitution of each thing is accustomed to hide itself. Heraclitus, Fragments
The now that passes creates time;
The now that remains creates eternity.
Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy
Understanding of the self only arises in relationship, in watching yourself in relationship to people, ideas, and things; to trees, the earth, and the world around you and within you. Relationship is the mirror in which the self is revealed. Without self-knowledge there is no basis for right thought and action. J. Krishnamurti, Krishnamurti
2. Mimetically Unpacking "Be The Change You Wish To See"
Stuff I write is often just stuff I want a better shot at remembering. In The Pocket Guide To Action (Kindle) I wrote, "The way you are in the world matters more than what you make in the world. ... You spread whatever you are." It's a hard one to remember, especially during a period where it seems that the only things happening are the Big Things.
In the Q&A's of yesterday's Waking Up virtual meditation retreat, Sam Harris responded to a question about how meditation can feel selfish or ridiculous when the world is full of big problems that need solving. He responded with something like "the only thing you will ever have to offer anyone in the world is, at some level, the quality of your mind."
In fact, those of us most hellbent on changing the world are most likely to spread assholery. We see the thing out there that needs to be different and tantrum about it rather than identifying how change might happen. We forget that the only tool we have to change stuff is ourselves, and that tool might not be functioning effectively, which is why Jiddu Krishnamurti suggests that:
To transform the world, we must begin with ourselves...
Let's ground this. Luke Burgis’ Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life (which we’ll revisit in a future letter) does a great job showing how that internal work can have big real-world consequences:
Each one of us has a responsibility to shape the desires of others, just as they shape ours. Each encounter we have with another person enables them, and us, to want more, to want less, or to want differently.
In the final analysis, two questions are critical. What do you want? What have you helped others want? One question helps answer the other.
And if you're not satisfied with the answers you find today, that's okay.
The most important questions concern what we will want tomorrow.
I've talked a bit about how we might "want differently" (Art of Manliness has the short version blog post, Modern Wisdom podcast). To get even more grounded, let's get physical. On his podcast, Ezra Klein talked about consumption as signaling:
The way I try to think about this is, don’t think about consumption — even your consumption — as individual. Think of yourself as a node for social, political and moral contagion.
He gives the specific example of going vegan and how being open about that choice can lead to larger change (here, this isn't about the morality of veggies, just what "being a change" can look like):
I don’t think my personal decision to not eat meat is that important. On the scale of the global animal trade, it’s meaningless. But I caught my veganism from my wife. Other people have caught veganism or vegetarianism from me. And it’s in that way that individual attitudes ladder up to social attitudes, and then to social and political change.
He goes on to say that, outside of a few critical cases like Brown vs. Board,
...the way politics changes is that enough individuals have changed - and I think this is true also for civil rights and a lot of the examples of what sometimes get looked at as legislative or legal change.
He's focused on politics here, but this applies to culture at every scale, too. In wrapping up he echoes what we heard in Wanting:
And it is why I’m a fan of people not being quiet about the way they try to instantiate their political ideals in their individual lives. I think that a lot of the value of the choices we make is in our willingness to try to use those to change the choices other people see as normal for them to make.
It's tough to overstate how much better it is to focus on being the change, but we can try. Here's Krishnamurti again:
If you as a human being transform yourself, you affect the consciousness of the rest of the world.
And, if that wasn't far enough:
What we are, the world is.
In our normal way of understanding, that's probably an overstatement. But it's a useful reminder that how we live shapes how those around us (and beyond) live. It's hard to appreciate how much our posture (in body and personality) impacts those we come in contact with.
Being the change is also really hard. That's why we see so many demands for change. It's easy to demand change. It's hard to change. Krishnamurti, someone with undeniable insight, likely had a long-term affair with his business partner's wife. Michael Jackson, too, did very bad things. Yet he knew, at some point in his life, where to start:
I'm starting with the man in the mirror
I'm asking him to change his ways
And no message could've been any clearer
If they wanna make the world a better place
Take a look at yourself and then make a change
3. Forgetting
Lewis Hyde’s A Primer for Forgetting: Getting Past the Past was one of the most uniquely amazing reading experiences I've had. It’s like the world’s most well-curated commonplace books (in some sense it's a masterful version of what I aspire to in these letters). Witgenstein’s description of his own Philosophical Investigations also describes A Primer for Forgetting perfectly (as quoted by Hyde):
"as remarks, short paragraphs, of which there is sometimes a fairly long chain about the same subject” while at other times “a sudden change, jumping from one topic to another"
A quote from Hyde himsel describes why I love his book:
Some books set us thinking on our own terms, not under their command; they leave us with our own reflections, not with the author’s.
The way this happens, and the structure of the book, is described by Hyde in the concluding pages:
I claim no strong connection between forgetfulness and this book’s episodic form, but if there is one, it most likely lies in the way that juxtaposition encourages not just free association but free forgetting. Jumping from one thing to another, the entries decline to declare a train of thought. I realize that putting macho Nietzsche next to Hitler’s abandoned bunker, for example, may be thought provoking and that some readers will bridge the gap with their own transitional abstraction. Myself, I leave it alone. Interpretation too readily declared dims the lights of things; holding off allows the elements to glow.
The book is broken into four notebooks:
Myth
Self
Nation
Creation
We’ll break out the highlights into the notebooks, but note that the sections intertwine and the categories are fairly loose.
There are a million loosely correlated ideas that I wanted to share from this book, and couldn't bring myself to cut it more than I already have. I've used headers (rather than bridging ideasa) and bolding to make it easier for you to skim for something that catches your eyes.
NOTEBOOK 1: MYTH
Defining Forgetting (And Remembering)
To remember is to latch on to something, to hold it in mind; to forget is to let it slip from consciousness, to drop it. All things grasped by mistake (a wrong impression, a hidden wasp) or by nature slippery (the eels of the mind) or overworked and confined (mind slaves, caged birds) or useless mental furniture (old phone numbers, hobbyhorses) or worn-out attitudes (self-importance, resentment)…, in every case to forget is to stop holding on, to open the hand of thought.
Self-Forgetting As Enlightenment
Note that the opening quote is the Zen Master Dogen.
“To study the Buddha Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to become one with the ten thousand things.” Note the sequence: First comes study, then forgetting. There is a path to be taken, a practice of self-forgetfulness.
Nietzche on forgetting in order to learn:
“Whoever wants really to get to know a new idea does well to take it up with all possible love, to avert the eye quickly from, even to forget, everything about it that is objectionable or false. We should give the author of a book the greatest possible head start and, as if at a race, virtually yearn with a pounding heart for him to reach his goal. By doing this, we penetrate into the heart of the new idea, into its motive center: and this is what it means to get to know it. Later, reason may set its limits, but at the start that overestimation, that occasional unhinging of the critical pendulum, is the device needed to entice the soul of the matter into the open,” says Nietzsche.
John Cage on forgetting and creativity:
Replying to a question about the effort he put into composing with chance operations, John Cage said, “It’s an attempt to open our minds to possibilities other than the ones we remember, and the ones we already know we like. Something has to be done to get us free of our memories and choices.”
In a much later section of the book:
Said John Cage to the painter Philip Guston, “When you start working, everybody is in your studio—the past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and above all, you own ideas—all are there. But as you continue painting, they start leaving, one by one, and you are left completely alone. Then, if you’re lucky, even you leave.”
John Cage on appreciating creativity:
“This is … why it is so difficult to listen to music we are familiar with; memory has acted to keep us aware of what will happen next, and so it is almost impossible to remain alive in the presence of a well-known masterpiece. Now and then it happens, and when it does, it partakes of the miraculous.”
On the real you
The truth about who you are lies not at the root of the tree but rather out at the tips of the branches, the thousand tips.
On remembering your wider heritage
To practice subversive genealogy means to forget the idealism of a singular forefather and remember these thousands. With that remembrance you must multiply the sense of who you are, multiply it until it disappears. Even Foucault studies the self to forget the self.
On balancing memory and forgetting
What is the sign or the mark of those who have drunk that blend of Memory and Forgetting? Here it is laughter.
....
A lively imagination requires a balance of memory and forgetting. “You should go in for a blending of the two elements, memory and oblivion,” says Jorge Luis Borges, “and we call that imagination.”
Two ways of forgetting
The point is worth repeating because two beneficial categories of forgetting recur throughout these notebooks: in one, a mind has become too attached to its concepts or thought-habits and needs to drop them so as to attend again to detail; in the other, a surfeit of detail clogs the flow of thought and must be winnowed so as to reveal the larger shapes of concept and abstraction.
On forgetting enabling grief
Sometimes a considered forgetting is the first step toward bringing the memory of the dead to life.
One of many examples from myth
In archaic Greece, these twin forces belonged to a set of related dualities, Aletheia aligned with memory, justice, sung speech, light, and praise, and Lethe aligned with oblivion, hiddenness, silence, darkness, and blame. Aletheia “was not the opposite of lies or falsehoods”; she was the opposite of all these other things, or rather she is one portion of an ambiguous force that can enlighten or darken, can lead to speech or silence, praise or blame. The Muses are agents not just of memory but of memory-forgetting (as in Hesiod, where their song brings both memory and “the forgetting of ills,” or in the Iliad, where they punish a boastful Thracian singer by making him “forget his artful playing”). Let us then reclaim forgetting as a component of truth, there being “no Aletheia without a measure of Lethe.” When a diviner or poet penetrates the invisible world, Memory and Oblivion both are present. And what is the name of this double thing found at the seam of silence and speech, praise and blame, light and darkness? Call it imagination, call it poetry.
Memory as action
The French psychologist Pierre Janet once suggested that we think of memory not as a thing fixed in the mind but as an action, “the action of telling a story,” and when it is successful, that action leads to “the stage of liquidation.” Forgetting appears when the story has been so fully told as to wear itself out. Then time begins to flow again; then the future can unfold.
Emerson on forgetting and grieving
“Teach me I am forgotten by the dead / And that the dead is by herself forgot,” wrote Emerson at the age of twenty-seven, his young wife, Ellen, having died. In his biography of Emerson, Robert D. Richardson points out that this prayer came at a turning point in Emerson’s life. He soon left his Concord home and traveled to Europe. He wanted to live again, and to do so, the boundary that separates the living from the dead must be sealed. In a case like this, “never forget” would be a deadly curse.
On unforgetting bloating the past
The spirits of such unforgetting are called the Furies, the Erinyes. They cling to the memory of hurt and harm, injury and insult. Their names are Grievance, Ceaseless, and Bloodlust. Their names are Grudge, Relentless, and Payback. They bloat the present with the undigested past. “Most dreaded of the forces of insomnia,” they harry the mind, demanding for its release a ransom paid in blood.
NOTEBOOK II: SELF
Each notebook starts with a list of aphorisms, here are 3 from this one:
Changes of identity call for large doses of forgetfulness.
Live steeped in history but not in the past.
Liquefy the fixed idea.
Emerson on contradicting oneself:
Americans have always claimed the right to reinvent themselves, and all changes of identity call for strong doses of forgetfulness. Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” stands as one of our earliest odes to forgetfulness in the service of a shifting self: “Why drag about this corpse of your memory, lest you contradict something you have stated in this or that public place? Suppose you should contradict yourself; what then? It seems to be a rule of wisdom never to rely on your memory alone … but to bring the past for judgment into the thousand-eyed present, and live ever in a new day.”
Restorative vs Reflective Nostalgia
In The Future of Nostalgia, Svetlana Boym places Nabokov’s work in a category of “reflective,” as distinct from “restorative,” nostalgia. Restorative nostalgia thinks it possible to go home again. It sets out to re-create the past precisely and impose it on the future.
Reflective nostalgia, on the other hand, may dream of an end to exile, but knowing that the home is in ruins and return impossible, it keeps delaying its departure. Yes, it longs to go back, but the stress falls on the longing, not on the home. It has learned to find pleasure in the marks that time leaves on all things—the patina on the bronzes, the candle soot on the frescoes.
Traumatic remembering
As Adam Phillips writes, “People come for psychoanalytic treatment because they are remembering in a way that does not free them to forget.” They are remembering by way of their symptoms, the compulsion to repeat being a kind of stuttering toward speech, toward the symbolization that can be held in mind and therefore worked upon until forgotten.
NOTEBOOK III: NATIONS
What is a nation?
In the late nineteenth century, the philologist Ernest Renan published an essay, “What Is a Nation?,” in which he argued that “the essence of a nation is that all its individuals have many things in common, and also that everyone has forgotten many things.” The point need not be limited to nations; all group identity, all abstract knowing, has such origins. Families know themselves by mixing recollection and elision; so do oral societies (which, says Walter Ong, keep themselves “in equilibrium … by sloughing off memories which no longer have present relevance”).
On politics
In his copy of Pascal, Henry Adams marked a line that reads, “All men naturally hate one another,” Adams himself applying the remark to “politics, as a practice,” calling it “the systematic organization of hatreds.”
What is a nation, again?
Karl Deutsch: “A nation is a group of people united by a mistaken view of the past and a hatred of their neighbors.”
On amnesty
Amnesty is judicial forgetting: the law agrees that it will not remember the crime. Memory may persist in other realms—people may talk, books may be written—but nothing will happen in the courts of law. In the courts, amnesty is forgetting as nonaction.
On our current political and cultural landscape
If, in the psychology of individuals, unresolved traumatic memories present themselves symptomatically (as obsessions, acting out, self-mutilation, nightmares, flashbacks, fainting spells…) does something similar hold for the psychology of nations? Does unexamined history reappear in some form of collective acting out, nightmare, flashback, and so on? If so, then forced forgetting doesn’t resolve or transcend a violent past but obliges it to live on by displacement.
On repressed violence repeating
Bly’s point, and mine, is that violence denied and repressed doesn’t disappear; it repeats. If “America” is a nation created by organized forgetting, then by this logic its foundational violence will always be with us, exported perhaps to foreign shores but “American” nonetheless. The proper burial of Little Crow’s remains could be thought of as an act of foreign policy.
NOTEBOOK IV: CREATION
Proust on creativity
The painter who figures largely in Marcel Proust’s novel, the narrator says, “The effort made by Elstir, when seeing reality, to rid himself of all the ideas the mind contains, to make himself ignorant in order to paint, to forget everything for the sake of his own integrity…, was especially admirable in a man whose own mind was exceptionally cultivated.”
Nietzsche on forgetting history to live
“The Use and Abuse of History for Life” is the nominal title, but it might more properly be called “The Use and Abuse of History Departments,” for Nietzsche reserved his scorn for academics who had saddled German youth with a “science of history” that stifled all emerging life and left the young feeling they were living “in the fifth act of the tragedy,” as if they were to be the proof of Hesiod’s prophecy “that men would one day be born with grey hair.” As antidote, Nietzsche recommended an “unhistorical” frame of mind figured as a fertile clouding of temporal categories, a “living whirlpool in a dead sea of night and forgetting” that could become the “cradle of deeds.” “The man of action … forgets a great deal to do one thing." ... Nietzsche made forgetting a part of the hero’s journey.
On why I like old ideas
We may think of myth as representing things from the primeval past, but a case like this shows that it is sometimes better to say that myth offers a map of present conditions, giving them authority by framing them as primeval. In an oral culture, each generation is free to reimagine its heritage in a form that matches the past to the present.
A practical implication
Simply put, the spread of written records as an artifice of memory called for a corresponding artifice of forgetting, what we now know as statutes of limitations.
Art that makes the future forgettable
Robert Smithson’s essay on his “minimalist” contemporaries, “Entropy and the New Monuments,” took as its point of departure this installation by Dan Flavin and led to his declaration that “instead of causing us to remember the past like the old monuments, the new monuments seem to cause us to forget the future.”
On the true self
"...true being emerges when the habits of mind usually obscuring it are suspended. The revelation of the true self requires this double forgetting—of habits of mind and of the time that would otherwise separate the present from the past.”
A proposed relationship to the Creator
Literature is a living thing distinct from the living person who made it. “To forget its Creator is one of the functions of a Creation.”
Meditation as self-forgetting
All thoughts and feelings are the seeds of possible actions; when we let them blossom into actual actions (physical or mental), they bear the fruit of individual self. I scratch an itch and now I am a Person-Who-Scratches. I daydream about fixing a leaky faucet or building a walnut bookcase and I am the Handyman. I fret about some stupid remark and I am the Dummy. Following a train of thought or acting on an impulse is the elemental form of self-making. Not acting but instead returning to the breath is the elemental form of self-forgetting.
On the forgettable life
Plato’s “Myth of Er” has it that the souls of the dead get to choose the life they will lead when next reborn. Er witnesses several famous souls making their choices, the last of these being Odysseus: “Now the memory of former sufferings having cured him of all ambition, he looked around for a long time to find the uneventful life of an ordinary man. He had some difficulty in finding this, which was lying about and had been neglected by everybody else; and when he saw it … he chose it with joy.” We have no story of this “ordinary man,” for his is a life that brings no glory, no kleos. It is a forgettable life, not a memorable one. Perhaps the reborn Odysseus, the happily uncelebrated man, still walks among us, living in a manner that leaves no mark on memory.
3. Miscellany
Old Dolly Parton interview clip talking why she works "without fear" and "never feels like a loser, even when I've lost". (TikTok, 27sec)
compared to voluntary entrepreneurs, firms founded by forced entrepreneurs are more likely to survive, innovate, and receive venture-backing. Explaining these results, we confirm labor shocks disproportionately impact high-earners and these same workers start more successful firms. (Paper)
Peter Zeihan, who was featured a couple of letters ago, has done a series of short videos commenting on recent presidents. Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Joe Biden
Why We Can’t Save The Ones We Love. (YouTube, 25min)
Interesting commentary on Dune The question the movie is asking Paul is not 'what have you done with your life?' or 'what will you do with your life?' but right now, in the moment, 'who are you?' (TikTok, 6min)
Jim Gaffigan on How Kim Kardashian Changed Comedy (TikTok, 1min)
Rick Rubin talking about how Eminem is always writing and Jay Z... isn't. (TikTok, 1min)
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Thank you for reading, it's an honor to be in your inbox. If there's an idea in here you liked, maybe forward this to someone who might appreciate it.
<3 Kyle
