On Love and Forgetting: A personal note

Georges Seurat, Seated Woman (1883)

I’m breaking my rule about no personal posts, but what good are rules if we don’t break them every now and again?

I was recently left by someone who I was really and truly prepared to love for the long haul. It was sudden, painful, and awful in ways that we’ve all experienced but still don’t have the words to describe. Someone really should come up with a break-up specific vocabulary… don’t Eskimos have about a million words for snow?

Of course, I wanted to lock myself in my room and not emerge for days or weeks, allowing myself the time to mourn the loss of something I wasn’t ready to let go of, but being a single mom, that was not an option. I had to go on as if nothing had changed, at least in front of my daughter (she’s only three). Which got me to thinking about forgetting. If I could forget the emotions that tied me to him, if I could stop replaying the hundreds of conversations that seemed only possible between the two of us,  then maybe I could really go on as if nothing had happened. It would be as if Mr. Peabody pushed a button on his WABAC machine, and all was reset. Byron captured it best, at the end of his poem “To Caroline,”

And yet, my girl, we weep in vain,
In vain our fate in sighs deplore;
Remembrance only can remain,
But that, will make us weep the more.

Again, thou best belov’d, adieu!
Ah! if thou canst, o’ercome regret,
Nor let thy mind past joys review,
Our only hope is, to forget!

A while back I wrote that his words in this poem elicit, at least in me, powerfully contrasting emotions. On the one hand it stirs a yearning for such a deep love, while at the same time it evokes a palpable sense of fear of experiencing such a profound loss. I suppose I knew then, when I wrote about Byron and love, that experiencing that kind of loss was a real possibility. Perhaps that’s why it was so hard then to type out those last two stanzas.

I’m currently reading a book titled Lethe: The Art and Critique of Forgetting, by Harald Weinrich. It had been sitting on my shelf for a while, and now it simply seemed like a good time to read it. The book traces “forgetting” through Western cultural history, from Homer, Vergil and Ovid, and Dante, to Kant, Freud, Proust, and Sartre (among others). This book actually reminds me quite a bit of Nocturne: A Journey in Search of Moonlight. Attlee searched for moonlight, Weinrich seeks forgetting. Although I’m only about halfway through the book, its been an interesting exercise to look at how others have sought forgetfulness; the countless poets, writers, and heroes that have chosen to exchange the weight of their memories for the lightness of a blank slate. If nothing else, its good to know that I’m in good company in wanting to forget.

Salvation and healing are sought in forgetting above all when a mortal is throated by pain and suffering. Forgetting one’s misfortune is already half of happiness.

Reading Lethe also brought to mind one Umberto Eco’s essay, “An Ars Oblivionaris, Forget it!” that I wrote about in the first days of this blog. In it Eco wrote about the impossibility of voluntary forgetfulness; that although we may employ several techniques to help us remember, there is, for better or worse, nothing we can do to help us forget. He suggests one way that we can if not quite forget, we can at least muddy the waters of memory,

“One forgets not by cancellation but by superimposition, not by producing absence but by multiplying presences.”

Needless to say, the application of that idea to this situation may have worked in my early twenties, but not now.  But if there was a method I could use to truly forget, would I use it? I’ve certainly fantasized about it this past month, but if seriously presented with the chance to “produce oblivion”, would I take it, even if it also meant forgetting all the good, too?

Then late last night I came across this post on the “Freshly Pressed” page. Needless to say, its title “On Eternal Sunshine, Erasing Memories, and Facebook Timeline” (okay, maybe not the Facebook part) immediately spoke to my current obsession with remembrance and forgetting. In the “Erasing Memories” segment of her post, she talked literally erasing her memories, or at least the evidence of them by deleting chat logs, Facebook messages, emails. (When I was in high school the equivalent would have been throwing away the letters, tearing apart the photographs and erasing the ubiquitous “mix tapes.) She refers to it as kind of “self-curating.” Its a great idea, in theory, but despite my desire to forget the love I felt and still feel, I’ve had no impulse whatsoever to delete anything. Although I’m nowhere near ready to go back and reread our exchanges, I imagine that one day looking back on them might provide a little clarity, some answers, or maybe just a chance to reminisce about something that was good.

She also mentioned the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I’ve seen the movie a couple of times in the past, and I’ve always liked it, although I could never really connect with it. I’ve always been a firm believer in some permutation of “no regrets,” and by extension that means “no forgetting.” I could never understand why Joel and Clementine chose to erase their memories of each other. Now I get it. There’s that part in the film where Joel (Jim Carey’s character) goes into Lacuna (which interestingly enough means  a blank space, gap, or missing part), to have the memories of his relationship with Clementine erased. The doctor then explains,

There’s an emotional core to each of our memories, and when you eradicate that core it starts its degradation process. By the time you wake up in the morning, all the memories we’ve targeted will have withered and disappeared, as in a dream upon waking.

An emotional core indeed. All my memories seem intertwined with emotion at the moment, and the urge to erase and forget is now strong. I suspect that if there did exist an ars oblivionaris, a Lacuna, Inc., or a river named Lethe for that matter, that I would be seriously tempted to use it, but I’m sure that if I did, that there would come a time when I would regret it. Even Joel, at the end of Eternal Sunshine, choses to remember. Erasing my memories would be erasing what was an incredibly loving, honest, passionate, and, well, a fundamentally good part of my life.

I suppose I’m glad that there’s no way to erase our memories, or to go back in time and reset everything. At the end of the day, despite the heartache of loss, I know that eventually the memories will be good ones. Today remembrance brings with it a mixed bag of hope, loss, regret, and longing, but although remembering is painful, maybe one day it will all make sense. After all, it’s all of these experiences that shape who we are. That, and of course only by acknowledging the past can we hope to make peace with it.