Should we forget everything?
Writing to reconcile with your memories.
Retreated in the land of mist and rain where summers never exceed 21 degrees, I remember with nostalgia the hot summers spent in the South of France since my childhood, the long birthday evenings that mark this period every year and the fierce mosquitoes that bite you to the bone.
These were the thoughts that appeared to my conscience last Friday while I was pedalling on my bike towards the gym.
Why did they arise at that time? Am I able to identify the factor that opened the door to memories that, not forgotten, simply wandered in the flow of my thoughts?
This Friday was particularly hot: the thermometer exceeded 26 degrees for the first time since my arrival in England. So was it the weather of the day that triggered the process? Possible.
Moreover, I find it curious to see how the weather can affect the general mood of a day: I noticed that I was systematically more enthusiastic and happy when the weather is good than when it rains or cold! Here too, I am probably linking the weather to happy memories.
The weather here plays the role of an anchor point, a notion that I would have the opportunity to clarify in the rest of this essay.
Forgetting is negatively defined as losing, voluntarily or not, definitively or momentarily, normal or pathologically, the memory of a person or thing. In my case, I have not really forgotten these memories since they suddenly appeared.
But what happens when you can no longer make a mathematical formula or a quote from an author appear to your consciousness? Can we say that we have forgotten them or is it impossible? In this case, where should we look?
When does it forget?
Beings of the world and social beings, we live and grow in constant interaction with each other because since Aristotle the human being is a "social animal". From childhood to adulthood, different bodies take care of our socialisation.
Therefore, we interiorise rules, norms and values, tacit or clearly expressed, under the influence of family, friends, broader social groups and finally the culture in which we fulfil ourselves.
These different stages essential to the construction of the individual as a social being form in each of us a vision of the world that is our own and that almost never completely coincides with that of others.
Thus, it sometimes happens that our actions and choices come to hurt others without necessarily having been executed for this purpose. So, the social bond is broken and realising it, we are sorry: the social injury is declared.
The remorse caused by the loss of a friend following an absurd and incomprehensible dispute, the result of a horrible misunderstanding, or breaking a passionate relationship with the one you love because of the influence of others, proof of mental weakness, marked my experience.
Even if these events are past and irreparable, they reappear to my consciousness. Time reduces injuries but leaves scars. Also, I sometimes think about what I should have done better...
Why can't we forget this type of event? Why can't we hold them back into the depths of our unconscious?
This is the word of repression placed, I must here introduce the reflections of the Austrian psychoanalyst, Sigmund Freud.
Repression is a process of fixing the drive to a representation and the inscription of this representation in the unconscious. It occurs above all:
"When an unpleasant impulse motion is awakened by an external perception." — Sigmund Freud, in the article "Inhibition, symptom and anxiety", 1926
The preconscious refers to an intermediate moment between the unconscious and consciousness, that is, the moment when memories and impulses are opening the door to move from the unconscious to consciousness. "External perception" is therefore the key that opens this door.
Thus, cycling, going to the football pitch or even just thinking about my college years are all external perceptions that invite these two painful memories to come to light.
But, "you can forget them!" I could be told, "you just don't have to think about it." Well, there’s the rub: these memories arise when you least expect them! They are waiting for their time to go out to the light.
“Then these motionless memories, feeling that I have just removed the obstacle, lifting the trap that kept them in the basement of consciousness, set in motion. They get up, they agitate, they perform, in the night of the unconscious, an immense macabre dance. And, all together, they run to the door that has just opened.” — Henri Bergson, L’énergie spirituelle, 1919
What Bergson describes here for dreams, which are born only when consciousness is dormant, could apply to memories when we are awake.
I see consciousness as a flow of thoughts and exchanges with the unconscious. For example, walking is a completely unconscious action: we are aware of walking but the action of walking is performed unconsciously, without thinking about it, in a natural way. We don't really control it. It's exactly the same for memories!
Caught in our thoughts, memory walks until it comes face to face with these painful events: this is where we come to think of them...
Also, this "refoulement after the fact" is silent: there is an absence or lack of translation of representations of things into representations of words.
In other words, fragments of images come to us but it is impossible to translate them with words or to totally externalise it.
But do we really forget?
We have images and sounds in mind but it is sometimes impossible to translate them into words because the language is imperfect: it is not powerful enough to express in a sufficiently fine way everything that memory means to us.
That's why they are painful: the impossibility of completely externalising them makes them horrible to bear.
Therefore, our mind remains fixed on this hiatus and refuses to be forgotten even if it harms our mental health.
Because yes, traumatic experiences are anomalies that the mind struggles to treat. If they are pushed back into the unconscious, they still haunt our nights. If they are too present in our consciousness, they destroy the life of the one who thinks of them for his greatest misfortune.
Thus, thousands of Jewish survivors from the death camps have been seen committing suicide many years after regaining a "normal" life: a strange phenomenon!
Why do they commit suicide since they have survived the most horrible experience a human being can experience? Why don't they continue to live since they have defeated death? Quite simply, because forgetting is impossible!
While they were destined to die like many of their comrades, they survived and it is because of this guilt of life that they make the choice of suicide. Perhaps it is to restore a form of justice in destiny...
If forgetting would have been necessary but no less impossible for these former deportees, forgetting is absolutely forbidden from a historical point of view. As a human being, we are forbidden to forget the atrocity of the crimes committed by the Nazi regime during the Second World War.
Perpetuating the memory of these events is a necessary but not sufficient duty to prevent the future.
Primo Lévi, a former deportee to Auschwitz and an Italian writer, died following a fall he made on the internal staircase of his building. Many people think of suicide...
Even this writer so lucid about his situation could not resist the guilt that haunted him since he left the camps. The injury was too deep, euthanasia had to be used.
“Can we describe as non-human the experience of who lived days when man was an object in the eyes of man.” — Primo Lévi, If This Is a Man, 1947
The reading of this work is overwhelming: it tries to show, with words, the unthinkable. Writing can be a medium to express, although imperfectly, what cannot come out in the form of words.
“I believe, for my part, that I could say the same, and that by living, then writing and meditating on this experience, I learned a lot about men and the world.” (Ibid)
Writing seems to be an escape. Writing is for me a cure that allows me to clarify my thoughts, to accept the disinterested observation of my most painful memories and to fix them on a blank page to look at them as they are.
This journey to the depths of me is healthy for my mental health. It allows me not only to put my memories into perspective but also to enlighten them in the light of other experiences.
“Dare to blacken the blank page with your thoughts. Don't be afraid of what will come out, accept it as a key to reading your identity.”
Writing allows me to sort my thoughts and choose those that deserve my consciousness to linger: it calms my mind.
Forgetting is impossible and necessary at the same time: it is a source of life
Forgetting is impossible but no less necessary.
This paradox, in appearance, could summarise Friedrich Nietzsche's thought on forgetting.
In his Untimely Meditations, Nietzsche argues that there is a form of forgetfulness, an oversight that could be described as positive, which is favourable to human life, or even a condition for human action.
To understand this, we need to understand the framework in which this thought is placed.
First, according to Nietzsche, history is understood in the sense of memory, which is the vital function of an individual with a consciousness and allows him to know the past and anticipate the future.
Nietzsche is the thinker of life: he considers the question of memory according to the criterion of the fulfilment of life, which is for him a supreme value.
« Memory has nothing to do with the nerves, with the brain. It is an original property. For man carries within him the memory of all past generations.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, 1873
It is by placing our mind in the river of becoming that perspectives change. Because he is the thinker of life, Nietzsche questions the homogeneous time of science and the linear time of the philosophies of history.
But as soon as there is perception, memory and imagination, homogeneous time gives way to a polychrony that, on the one hand, makes the strength of the living, but on the other despairs a reason unable to think, as Aristotle had well seen, if not "by rest and stop".
Nietzsche therefore connects the individual and his ability to know the infinity of time: historical and cultural time first, then biological time.
Unlike the animal that is "anhistoric" and that lives in the present moment because it is devoid of memory, man lives in a historical way because it is endowed with a memory.
He cannot experience such happiness, since he is unable to live only in the present moment.
According to Nietzsche, happiness is the ability to live without having a depreciative value judgement on the present life. Indeed, it is because man can remember the past that he depreciates the present life: by comparison between these two states, the present moment and the past moment, he tends to devalue the present in favour of the past and therefore to devalue the present life.
That is why, cultivating forgetfulness is necessary to promote the realisation of life: it is also necessary to know how to forget, and remember to forget, to be able to live.
Nietzsche therefore links forgetting to health. Forgetting is a fundamental property of life. Not certainly the total forgetfulness that the philosopher maintains is impossible, but an active forgetfulness, a "willingness to forget".
While for Freud repression is always a failure, since what is eliminated from consciousness continues to tyrannise the unconscious, Nietzsche not having recourse to this dualism can make repression a biological and not psychic act, a property of the healthy body.1
« This is the principle that the reader is invited to consider: historical as well as anhistorical are good for the health of an individual, a people and a civilisation.» — Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations
All this reminds me of the principle of anchor points. An anchor point is for me a sensation, often positive, that I relate to an empirical situation and that I can solicit at any time when I feel the need.
They serve me to put myself in a certain state of mind according to a particular situation.
For example, I have an anchor point that, when I feel sad for no particular reason, triggers and makes memories appear in my mind that make me proud and joyful. The effect is immediate: dopamine is secreted and I immediately feel better.
Thus, the anchor point allows you to make a brief return to the past in order to refocus your mind in the present moment without being bothered by the anguish of a future that we do not yet know.
Writing is a way to dive into the depths of oneself, to put words on sensations that speech cannot express.
Writing is the best way to feel better in moments of doubt or nostalgia.
Antoine
"Le souvenir d'une certaine image n'est que le regret d'un certain instant.” — Marcel Proust, Du Côté de chez Swann
What I have discovered this week:
Podcast: Expansion par Eric Flag
Book: Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of NIKE, Phil Knight
You can follow me and my new platform Herro:
Voici ici un paragraphe emprunté à l’article de Philippe Granarolo qui explique précisément la démarche nietzschéenne :
While it was memory that allowed man, according to Saint-Augustin, to build time, it is oblivion that will fulfil this function for Nietzsche, as appears in a paragraph of the Genealogy of morality rarely read as it should be: "[...] make a little silence, a clean table in our conscience to leave room for something new [...] this is the usefulness of forgetting [...] kind of bailiff guardian of the psychic order, tranquillity, etiquette: we immediately see why without forgetting there can be no happiness, serenity, hope, or pride, or present". Much more than a tool in the service of happiness, as it was in the first writings, forgetfulness here becomes the creator of the present. Without him, in fact, there could be no present: forgetfulness is what we would be unable to situate ourselves in temporality [...] Memory and forgetfulness then become synonymous to designate together our new relationship to temporality. Because the whole of the past is present in us, and therefore with it the totality of the future that the loops already travelled contain, our "memory" includes not only the trace of the sequences that have already occurred, but the totality of the future. Far from suffocating us under the unbearable weight of time, it gives us access to eternity. This faculty, considered overwhelming in the context of a linear time, is a source of lightness, it transforms us into this future humanity of which Zarathustra contemplates the dance with a mixture of nostalgia and fascination.