by Nils Peterson
A pen between God-fingers, a walking stick dragon,
my blind mind taps along its cane of thought. Rumi (trans. Barks)
Saturday morning. Not quite ready for coffee from the espresso machine. Eyes closed. Brooding over the thises and thats. Remembering the start of a thread of thought that wove forward and backwards over the last couple of days. Now trying to remember and writing some of it down.
Here’s the poem which started it.
Map of the New World
- Archipelagoes
At the end of this sentence, rain will begin.
At the rain’s edge, a sail.
Slowly the sail will lose sight of the islands;
into a mist will go the belief in harbors
of an entire race.
The ten-years war is finished.
Helen’s hair, a grey cloud.
Troy a white ashpit
by the drizzling sea.
The drizzle tightens like the strings of a harp.
A man with clouded eyes picks up the rain
and plucks the first line of the Odyssey. Derek Walcott
Reading it touched something that’s been on my mind. I found myself wondering how long it would be before the Homer in the last lines would go unrecognized by everyone except scholars. I fear the loss of the mythologies of Greece and Rome that provided a binding field of imagery and felt-meaning to centuries of poets of the West. Yes, it is part of the general down grading of the humanities but also an understanding that one can no longer be well-educated and eurocentric. And we are finite. We do not have “world enough and time,” memory enough and time. So much must be lost, replaced, Forgotten.
A couple of days before my brooding, I had added as a kind of footnote in a letter to a friend – Elizabeth Bishop’s wonderful poem, “The Art of Losing.” Here’s the opening stanza:
The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
I had looked at it again because a friend sent it to a friend as kind of a consolation for having broken up with a woman, but I was fiddling and this is what I wrote and sent back to the friend who originally had sent the Bishop.
We’ve lost Rome and Athens too
It isn’t very hard to do
and really not a great disaster
when we’ve our twitter feed to master.
I’d been reading a remarkable book by Lewis Hyde called A Primer for Forgetting, Getting Past the Past. Another friend had sent me a poem he’d written about the horrific end of the Odyssey. I sent him this note:
I too, the last time I read the book, was horrified at the end which I had somehow forgotten. But your note reminds me that I’ve been wanting to write to you and others about an extraordinary book by Lewis Hyde. I’m trying to get anyone I know of good sense to read it. It’s in short bits running from half a page to 6 or 7 pages and basically covers the history of the world in terms of remembering and forgetting. He deals with the Greeks towards the beginning and comes back to them at the end. I’m going to quote all of this half page essay from almost the end:
“CLOSURE. When Odysseus slays the suitors at the end of the Odyssey, there is a risk that those killings will trigger yet another round of grief, anger, and revenge. In fact, Eupithes, father of the first man slain, unsheathes his sword and calls for vengeance, saying – in words liable to invoke the Furies [Hyde had dealt with the Furies earlier] – that a ‘grief that cannot be forgotten’ has seized him. At this point. Zeus intervenes: Odysseus has done enough – his honor has been restored, he will be king again – and now ‘we, for our part, will blot out the memory/ of sons and brothers slain. As in the old time/ let men of Ithaca henceforth be friends.’ The needed forgetting is authored by the gods, not by mortals, as if in Homeric times the forgetting of discord were an art as yet foreign to humankind. Note that when Zeus blots out the memory of strife, the story comes to an end. Plots are fueled by memory-as- action; forgetting as nonaction brings the epic to a close.”
Hyde’s book begins after a couple of opening sentences with “‘Oral societies,’ I read, keep themselves ‘in equilibrium…by sloughing off memories which no longer have relevance.’ My interest at the time was in memory itself, in the valuable ways that persons and cultures keep the past in mind, but here was a contrary note, one that clearly stirred my own contrary spirit.”
The book ends with a quotation from the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa:
Remembering betrays Nature,
Because yesterday’s Nature is not Nature.
What’s past is nothing and remembering is not seeing.
Fly, bird, fly away; teach me to disappear.
Well, much to brood on here. I like remembering. I’m not sure my present and past are separable. We seem to coexist in what ever moment is now. (The future must be there too.) Yet I can see how unless one can forget the past, one is captive to it.
How much forgetting I and my generation have had to do, WWI, gone, WWII on its way out, The Korean hanging on by a thread. France, Germany, Italy have forgotten enough to be friends. Japan’s our friend, Pearl Harbor forgotten on our side, the atomic bomb on theirs. The Israeli and the Palestinians can’t forget. They’ve been remembering for 2000 years. The Russians and Ukrainians will have to forget, the sooner the better for both. How hard that is to say.
The fact of written language makes it harder to forget. Maybe the internet and iCloud will make it impossible.
In the face of great offense, we say “We will never forget,” yet we must and Zeus is not here to help us.
But Jesus tells us in Mark “But I say to you, love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you….” This isn’t exactly forgetting, more a putting aside, a way of not letting the past dictate your present.
But I end with the sense of the dance that goes on between memory and forgetting, knowing and not knowing, the now and the not-now and seemingly the need for divine intervention to make things right. Maybe Time is the only god that will do, but He/She takes their time.