[lit-ideas] Re: It is worth a story ...

  • From: David Ritchie <profdritchie@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Tue, 12 Jun 2012 09:44:59 -0700

On Jun 12, 2012, at 6:51 AM, John Wager wrote:

> Four thoughts:
> 
> 1.  It is not just a sad thing to forget history, forgetfulness is an 
> absolutely essential gift and a necessary condition to live. Of course SOME 
> of us should be burdened with memory, so that the horrible events of the past 
> are not continued, but those so burdened should be singled out as exceptional 
> individuals who have taken on a burden that normal people should not have to 
> bear. If we ALL remembered the past, NONE of us would be able to get past the 
> injuries and injustices and harm and murder and warfare of the past; we would 
> be living in a war of all against all, because everybody has some connection 
> to some murderous past.  The only way to continue to live is to forget that 
> the Japanese tried to murder my father, or that the Vietnamese tried to 
> murder me, so that I can go to Tokyo and feel "safe" and my daughter could go 
> to Vietnam and also feel safe. Thank God for such forgetfulness! It allows us 
> all to get along, despite our past.

My history of forgetting is currently stalled, but it may one day make the 
point that attitudes to forgetting have changed over time.
> 
> 
> 3. The above is written by a 66 year old man who finds that forgetfulness is 
> indeed a personal blessing; it is not as essential to remember nearly as much 
> as I thought it would be essential to remember when I was a young 'un looking 
> at those really old 66 year old men around me.  Linda in "Death of a 
> Salesman" says "Life is a casting-off" and this is true in personal memory as 
> well as collective memory.  What is essential and what is accidental is 
> decided by what is remembered and what is forgotten.

I do, however, envy the one daughter who has extraordinary recall.  I can sing 
a couple of lines of this and that; she recalls all the words *and* the tune.
> 
> 4.  The young German historian below is a good teacher.  Of course it's more 
> difficult in history to look for what's not there, but in reading an author, 
> it's easier to read for what he has not written. That's a higher-level 
> reading skill not taught as much as it should be.  After finishing 
> Aristotle's Ethics, what did he not write about that he could have but that 
> he mostly left out?  After finishing a novel, what parts of the story did the 
> author leave out, purposefully? What part of a post is the part that nobody 
> replies to?

The reason I remember this fellow is that I've been taking the idea seriously 
since we first discussed it.  It's a cliche in art that the negative space is 
compositionally as important as the positive space.  Not so in other fields.  
We know it's there; the question is how to report it and whether it has much 
meaning.

David Ritchie,
squinting between raindrops in
Portland, Oregon  
> 
> David Ritchie wrote:
>> On Jun 11, 2012, at 10:42 PM, cblists@xxxxxxxx wrote:
>> 
>> On 12-Jun-12, at 12:36 AM, David Ritchie wrote:
>> ... Should someone, I wonder, begin a petition drive to sponsor a memorial 
>> to the Ignorant of History?  They too must have had virtues, grandmothers, 
>> cute children. ... [Entertaining cat and ignorant neighbour story follows.]
>>> Cf.: "Writer Thomas Pynchon articulated about the scope and structure of 
>>> one's ignorance: 'Ignorance is not just a blank space on a person's mental 
>>> map. It has contours and coherence, and for all I know rules of operation 
>>> as well. So as a corollary to [the advice of] writing about what we know, 
>>> maybe we should add getting familiar with our ignorance, and the 
>>> possibilities therein for writing a good story.'"
>> This reminds me of a young German historian who urged us to write about what 
>> was missing from the archives, histories of gaps.  Negative space is 
>> difficult to describe.
> 
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