Forgetting ME in South Beach

 

by David Arthur Walters

Fools are bound to remember what they try to forget because the effort is thinking about it again. Try not to think of white elephants by thinking about them, and you will be thinking of what you are trying to forget. Try not to think about death when you are almost dead already. 

Betty interrupted me last evening when I began to describe my ordeal with the healthcare machine that is supposed to save me from inevitable death as long as possible yet is itself one of the leading causes of death.

“Stop trying to help people with healthcare reform!” She ordered, screaming in the phone because she is hard of hearing. “They don't give a damn about you, they despise you and will not even say thank you! Just forget it and take care of yourself.”

She went on to describe her own ordeal at length, overriding my every attempt to comment on my most important subject, namely, whatever has to do with Me. She, like many women, have been intimidated by men in person into keeping their mouths shut, so long distance gives her a chance to vent.

“She is right,” I reflected on her advice, “I am an underground man, and people do not like such men when they surface to challenge the Machine. Maybe I should hide my spiteful self underground and publish inane romances, hiding the awful truth about the Kierkegaardian Category of One that is within all of us gods incarnate."

I only wish I could forget my horrible experience at Sun Capital Partners' Clinical Care Medical Center in South Beach, but the more I try to forget it, the more I recall every fact in a recurring, Kafkaesque Trial before I fully awake in the mornings as well as during depressing naps in the afternoons. The Medicare Advantage scammers want to send over a nurse to ask me if I am depressed in hopes of increasing the risk level to augment insurance company profits so the executives can take more millions in bonuses.

"Have you been depressed for more than two weeks?" the Medicare Advantage nurse wants to know.

Good grief! What poor old man or woman living alone in a crack in the Wall would not be depressed on Medicare Advantage, especially if desperate enough to take the Day Care bus to play bingo at the Day Care Clinical Center, get their temperature and blood pressure taken and a hairdo, sweet roll and coffee? 

Well, forget that! I am an underground man! I decided to entertain myself with the latest book I got for a dollar at the library,  David Rieff's In Praise of Forgetting, a small book that fits nicely in my back pocket so I can take it to Ocean Drive with a can of hard seltzer bought at the Dollar Store for a buck, sit across the street from a fine restaurant, where tourists are dropping $50 each, enjoy the restaurant's music and an eminent scholar's company along with a drink, all for a grand total of $2.  

In Praise of Folly by Erasmus did me some good in the Heart of America, I recalled from my sojourn in Kansas City, so why not In Praise of Forgetting by Rieff in South Beach? 

“Of course there is nothing new under the sun,” I noted as I perused In Praise of Forgetting.  I wondered how many copies of his book about the classic difference between remembering and forgetting had he sold and why would people buy them.

David, if I may, is a "distinguished" author, I noted. Now there is a word writers should take great interest in, to discover how to obtain such a distinction and create  an algorithm to write by. 

First of all, I learned, he is Susan Sontag's child. Susan was not very happy at home and retreated to writing about other things. She was a provocative essayist with a high education who immersed herself in conflict and believed she was a great novelist. She had her beloved son David by Phillip, a sociologist and critic in his own right, whom she married when she was 17. Phillip wrote about Freud, whom, as we well know, thought neurotic conflicts can be resolved by remembering painful experiences rather than forgetting them. Yet David praises forgetting in his book, and discusses the difference between memory and history, wherein he provides contemporary illustrations, mainly the Holocaust, of where therapeutic forgetting may be applied. 

The theme, I supposed as I paused to drink my lime-flavored Take Five brew, is people dwell too much on the Holocaust and should try to be more forgetful. 

Betty, My blue-eyed, blonde Germanic friend would certainly agree. She was despised and called a Nazi in grade school after films of the concentration camps were shown in the fifth grade. She was raised in Tennessee by parents who had a sort of plantation. She ostensibly despises negroes and Jews, but not if they are intellectually brilliant or wealthy or, rarely, both. She loves Martin Luther King's speeches;--I was mugged on Chicago's Southside within earshot of one his most eloquent speeches. She seems to despise me, on the one hand, as if I am a dirty Jew, and, on the other hand, she said she's hopelessly attracted by my intellect. 

Am I a dirty Jew because half my father's family were killed in the concentration camps? His mother translated for the Resistance, and, after the war, she converted to Catholicism. My father seldom talked about religion except to say that he was a cryptic Jew. So, I ask again, am I a dirty Jew? Who knows? 

Ministers said Jesus was a Jew. Was he dirty? I don't think so; he like to wash his disciples feet as a sign that they should clean themselves up. Sunday school teachers said Jesus loves me: they certainly did not, so they used him as an excuse. They may have good intentions, but they are liars. Having the Unknown for your one-god is a good idea; you may even be an Atheist. Anyway, for the sake of identify, a Jew should never forget the longstanding persecution of his superior culture. 

Now David Rieff happens to be an esteemed professor with Jewish roots. Culture counts. I myself am allegedly descended from the Campbell clan, whose motto is Ne Obliviscaris. I am by the way, in a rather long line for the throne of England. At least according to my father, who said Jeremiah did not perish in Egypt. No, he escaped to the British Isles, where our descent from the prophetic real estate speculator can be found chiseled on a stone buried under some castle.

Not that bad experiences should be completely forgotten. For healthy effect, David argues, one should strike the right balance between remembering and forgetting. Yet I think he vacillates too much between the extremities, a dialectical process enjoyed by liberal philosophers ad infinitum for the sake of progress. 

Dialectic, you see, is not strictly logical. Dialectic is inherently irrational, a wheel to someplace beyond good and evil, but it never arrives, so nothing is resolved, and, if one lives long enough, he suspects that the wheel is just turning in place around a motionless axis as high is brought low and vice versa. You see,  those who happen to be high are inevitably brought low and crushed, as is hoped by those underneath the awesome wheel.

David opines rightly that histories differ from witnesses' memories of events. Witnesses die, history is distorted or forgotten by various authors. I believe a good historian should try to find and stick with original documents instead of exercising contemporary biases and his own prejudices, duct you? Not only are histories limited by the perspectives and circumstances of their authors, ideologies have a marked influence, so we have activist history: propaganda. 

That is not to say that all propaganda is false. Tell me, is Christian propaganda including its Jewish precedents false? 

As an underground man in perpetual crisis, I believe the Crucifixion is representative of man's original anxiety, the underlying hypo-crisy between reality and the ideal. I think the "I" in the intersection of the crossbars. Beyond that, beyond good and evil, is Nothing, in my opinion. The negative has a positive quality, and it may actually be the positive, as if Nothing exists in the background, absolute space without content, when we are conscious of the unknown, which "is" something else besides positive objects. Objects in space negate space. Do you know what I am talking about? I think I do, but I may be mistaken.

So history is the propagation of truth and lies, always limited by perspectives. Facts alone are insufficient. Facts are events in time, not isolated points on a timeline. It is impossible to know and cite all or the All. Judgment requires interpretation of facts. 

Everyone does seem to know, as a matter of habit, who they are. I think they had their doubts, were afraid of not existing or being nothing, and found some security in defining themselves, with the help of others, as individuals with unique coincidences of qualities. But if we remove the cornerstone of the definitions and peer into the basement of the temples, we would be terrified by chaos.

So who am I, lodged in this inebriated body-mind sitting on Ocean Drive? I am not the That of the Tat Tvam Asi.

Why, David Rieff might say I am suffering from hyperthymesia, excessive remembering. Maybe I need more therapeutic forgetting. Alzheimer's provides some relief. Unpleasant people may be please us when they forget themselves. Drugs, shock therapy if not prefrontal lobotomy might help the so-called mentally ill.

Why not live in the Present like the animal that you basically are? Drink the Kool-Aide. Take the seminars, be liberated from either/or logic by the priests and gurus. You are innocent, after all, because the supreme deity, namely you, is both good and evil.

Not only forgive, forget altogether. Open your hand, just let it go. If that is too extreme, try to arrive at the right balance. Live on the Tao between Yin and Yang.

What is the logical alternative? Stop vacillating! Grow up, get wise and stop playing on the swings, teeter-totters and merry-go-rounds! Read the Gita, take a side and fight to the death, kill relatives on the other side if need be...

I have forgotten myself by thinking about this other David, this professor named Rieff. What was it that I forgot? I do not know. I am an underground man, hidden from myself on this very park bench in South Beach, scribbling this entry in the account of my existence....

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