Forgetting

Experience is not dear. We come by it as a matter of course, a consolation gift for just staying alive. Which is why there is the memorable and then everything else. No matter how nuanced that gesture with which I swabbed my ear was, it is unnecessary to carry its memory to the end. Maybe, only until tomorrow, at which time I will repeat some version of that gesture again, must I remember. Maybe only for that short period after bathing where I might be prompted to swab by my proximity to the medicine cabinet. I am saved from having to examine the state of my ear, and from having to compare the gestures of then and now, by remembering for just the right amount of time.

What I had suspected was that forgetting is profound. What I always suspect of things. Choosing to write on a thing promises that ... and most often reneges. Forgetting must have its reasons because I do it so well. It must be a skill, a craft, a talent. If it is mine, so it must be. But the problem is that I want to still own what I have already given away.

All this forgetting must be getting me somewhere. Why lose mind? The content of the mind is a precious cargo, not like the ballast of flesh that should be jettisoned when inconvenient. Why not loose an inconvenient memory, or one just taking up space without reason. Is experience so precious, that the ephemera of its every moment must be archived?

Now I have made memory trivial, and explained forgetting in terms of a hierarchy of importance and of function — of convenience. This explanation is wholly unsatisfactory. If it weren't for this entry here, the whole affair would be soon forgotten.