The Art of Forgetting

Can we choose to forget? In a 1966 (English translation 1988) paper, Umberto Eco argued that unlike the long tradition of European memory arts that used symbolic means to aid recollection, an ars oblivionalis, or an art of forgetting, is impossible. Mnemonics can be constructed with an astonishing variety of methods, but they all rely upon semiosis. An art of forgetting would also be semiotic. But it is a feature of signs to make what is absent present to mind. The reverse cannot be true, as should we say “There never was a rose,” we still inevitably call one to mind. Yet Eco describes a number of experiences—dealing with circuit breakers after a power outage, playing the dictionary game, and trying to recall the meaning of foreign words—that reliably produce a kind of forgetting. He concludes that forgetting is produced not by the subtraction of signs but their overabundance, “not by producing absences but by multiplying presences.”

We see such techniques in the early modern attempts to create arts of forgetting. One particularly interesting example of such a text, published in 1610, is titled Simonides Reborn, or The Art of Memory and Forgetting…Expressed in Tables. The title alludes to the traditional story of the origin of memory arts. Frances Yates opens her famous work, The Art of Memory, with a recounting of the legend:

At a banquet given by a nobleman of Thessaly named Scopas, the poet Simonides of Ceos chanted a lyric poem in honour of his host but including a passage in praise of Castor and Pollux. Scopas meanly told the poet that he would only pay him half the sum agreed upon for the panegyric and that he must obtain the balance from the twin gods to whom he had devoted half the poem. A little later, a message was brought in to Simonides that two young men were waiting outside who wished to see him. He rose from the banquet and went out but could find no one. During his absence the roof of the banqueting hall fell in, crushing Scopas and all the guests to death beneath the ruins; the corpses were so mangled that the relatives who came to take them away for burial were unable to identify them. But Simonides remembered the places at which they had been sitting at the table and was therefore able to indicate to the relatives which were their dead. The invisible callers, Castor and Pollux, had handsomely paid for their share in the panegyric by drawing Simonides away from the banquet just before the crash. And this experience suggested to the poet the principles of the art of memory of which he is said to have been the inventor.

Though the art of memory had many uses in the ancient world, it was associated most closely with rhetoric. Indeed, this story comes to us from Cicero in his description of the techniques used by orators to prepare for speaking at great length. Its most extensive treatment is in the Rhetoric to Herennius, long thought to have also been by Cicero, which describes the method for training one’s memory. The aspiring orator should find a ruin or an abandoned building and walk through it to impress deeply into their mind its various places, or loci. This is the permanent backdrop of artificial memory. To remember any specific thing, one would then set images in these places that were strange, vivid, and encoded to recall the next part of one’s speech. The famous example is of case to defend a man accused of poisoning a rival heir in front of witnesses. The orator should imagine a man ill in bed

holding in his right hand a cup, in his left, tablets, and on the fourth finger, a ram's testicles (testes). In this way we can have in memory the man who was poisoned, the witnesses (testes), and the inheritance.

While the cup reminds of poison and the wax tablet of the will, the wordplay on testes—meaning both testicles and witnesses—helps make the image vivid and strange, an essential feature of memory arts.

Adam Bruxius, the author of Simonides Redivivus, spends most of his work tabulating an immense variety of such strange images. But briefly, at the close of his tome, he spends a few pages defending and illustrating a complementary art of forgetting:

[A]rtificial memory consists of places & images. If you take away these two, you are left with the art of forgetting. But because one cannot take away places from images, just as we cannot utterly demolish a house by hanging pictures in it or break a tablet by writing on it, the method and means for removing images [figuras] without shattering their places must be shown.

Here Bruxius anticipates Eco’s objections. The mnemotechnic image and its associative outgrowths can only ever bring something into mental presence. But

[a]lthough images are joined to the places they inhabit for whatever time, so too whenever the mind’s eye is turned upon these places, they will readily show themselves to you, together with these things, of which the images are abstractions. However, as soon as these have been removed from their places, they will no longer be shown there, and by dint of that so too will those things which they were the mementos of and placed in those places for safekeeping no longer be seen.

The same vivid imagery used for association is now put to use as a distraction, a barrier to mental vision and the understanding consequent on it. Just as natural memory takes much less pains in forgetting than it does in remembering and recollecting, so too the art of forgetting is much simpler, requiring only one table. The imaginative transformations Bruxius suggest conjure up those strange pitture metafisici of Giorgio de Chirico, of lonely, impossible streets, inhabited only by ruins, statues, and shadows.

So what does the mind see in its art of forgetting? Its places may be emptied and so multiplied that one wearies of wandering through this unfurnished mansion. Or perhaps the room is watched by guards who may be frozen or cataleptic, their legs edematous, feet stuck to the floor, heads hung low. Should the room remain, its images may be covered by lavender, snow, ages of dust, or embossed everywhere with designs that draw the eye into the hypnotic pattern of ornament. The images may, at the moment you enter, be subject to iconoclastic violence by drunkards or mercenaries, have been scorched by lightning, or simply have fallen prey to the ruin of time, leaving only mouldering fragments. Perhaps these images are no longer there at all, scattered by a whirlwind, or moved by a servant assigned to clean the room, who has carried it away in suds or with the excrement in a bedpan. Was it stolen by avenging furies or Micah the Levite? Taken by the rains or a flood? They may have broken and thrown outdoors—by Turks, Jews, Croats, marauding Gauls, or any spectral people who may distract us with our own vengeful ignorance from the image we wish to forget. This is the image that will come to occupy the rooms of oblivion—the guilty, caught forever in the act, destroying an image and so creating an image of destruction. If even this distracting calumny fails, we may simply affix the image to long poles, held out of view from even the clear vision of the mind, save for the light thrown off from its burning in effigy, as at the celebration of the Silesians, when they turned from their idols by making them into torches for a new festival, carrying them aloft through the narrow alleys of the city.