Oblivion

Oblivion 1.The state of being unaware or unconscious of what is happening around one, 2. Destruction or extinction, 3. The state of being forgotten, especially by the public. Origin late Middle English: via Old French from Latin oblivio(n-), from oblivisci 'forget'. Synonym Amnesia Oblivion in psychology is a defense mechanism. As suppression pushing into the unconscious, trying to forget something that causes you anxiety. In Greek mythology, Lethe (Greek: Λήθη, Lḗthē; Classical Greek [lɛː́tʰɛː], modern Greek: [ˈliθi]) was one of the five rivers of Hades. Also known as the Ameles potamos (river of unmindfulness), the Lethe flowed around the cave of Hypnos and through the Underworld, where all those who drank from it experienced complete forgetfulness. Lethe was also the name of the Greek spirit of forgetfulness and oblivion, with whom the river was often identified. In Classical Greek, the word lethe literally means "oblivion", "forgetfulness", or "concealment".It is related to the Greek word for "truth", aletheia (ἀλήθεια), which through the privative alpha literally means "un-forgetfulness" or "un-concealment". Lethe, the river of forgetfulness, was one of the five rivers of the Greek underworld. The shades of the dead were required to drink the waters of the Lethe in order to forget their earthly life. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lethe Now I begin. Listen me. I’m coming from nothing. Nothing I come from. Nothing behind me. Behind me none. I am. I am me. Only me. Me and no one else. Me and nothing else. Look. Listen. No story. No face. Only me. Me and nobody else. Me and nothing else. Look. Listen. No story. No face. Only me. That what I am. That and nothing less. That and nobody else. That’s how all will begin. I know. Only that way all can begin. To be me, to be only me and to feel only me and nothing before me and before me nobody and from nothing to come and nothing to come from. This is to be what I am. That’s how all can begin. Cause I feel so. Now all can be. Cause I feel so. All from me who am me and nobody

else and nothing else and from nothing to come from. I feel it. Now I begin. Only now I can begin cause I feel it. Born. I have no story to tell. No book to open. No scene to view. ¨Λήθη¨ Δημητριάδη translated Soφia Stamatiou

Yet a single sound, a single scent, already heard or breathed long ago, may once again, both in the present and the past, be real without being present, ideal without being abstract, as soon as the permanent and habitually hidden essence of things is liberated, and our true self, which may sometimes have seemed to be long dead, but never was entirely, is re-awoken and re-animated when it receives the heavenly food that is brought to it. One minute freed from the order of time has recreated in us, in order to feel it, the man freed from the order of time. And because of that we can understand why he trusts his joy, and even if the simple taste of a madeleine does not seem logically to contain reasons for this joy, we can understand how the word ‘death’ has no meaning for him; situated outside time, what should he fear from the future? In search of lost time, Volume 6 Finding time again by Marcel Proust, translated by Ian Patterson Nine days our fleet the uncertain tempest bore Far in wide ocean, and from sight of shore: The tenth we touch’d, by various errors toss’d, The land of Lotus and the flowery coast. We climb’d the beach, and springs of water found, Then spread our hasty banquet on the ground. Three men were sent, deputed from the crew (A herald one) the dubious coast to view, And learn what habitants possess’d the place. They went, and found a hospitable race: Not prone to ill, nor strange to foreign guest, They eat, they drink, and nature gives the feast The trees around them all their food produce: Lotus the name: divine, nectareous juice! (Thence call’d Lo’ophagi); which whose tastes, Insatiate riots in the sweet repasts,

Nor other home, nor other care intends, But quits his house, his country, and his friends. The three we sent, from off the enchanting ground We dragg’d reluctant, and by force we bound. The rest in haste forsook the pleasing shore, Or, the charm tasted, had return’d no more. Now placed in order on their banks, they sweep The sea’s smooth face, and cleave the hoary deep: With heavy hearts we labour through the tide, To coasts unknown, and oceans yet untried. Homer’s Odyssey, book ix, translated by Alexander Pope

In Odyssey oblivion follows the act of swallowing a Lotus. Our days can oblivion stand as an conscious deed or can only be mentioned as an Homer’s concept? By Bergson we have two memory forms. The past survives as a bodily habit or as an independent recollection. Habits shaped by repeating acts are embodied in the body. As an example we can use the learn it by heart study method that we used in school and with which we would create a cerebral mechanism as a routine of the body. In order to achieve some personalization I will ask you to identify the moves that you repeat in your daily routine. This repeats put you between that what affects you and that what you act on and force you to develop motor mechanisms that either are reflex or voluntary. The practical and consequently the usual function of memory is to utilize past experience for present use – recognition in short – actualizing them in two different ways. Some times it lies in the act itself and the reflex activation of a mechanism adopted from the circumstances. Other ties implies an effort of the mind which seeks in the past so to use in the present those representations which are the most suitable to enter into the present situation. The common perception brings back only those memories-images which can be useful to the present. We become conscious of these mechanisms as they come into play, and this consciousness of a whole past of efforts stored up in the present is indeed a memory but a memory bent upon action, seated in the present and looking only to the future. It has preserved from the past only the intelligently coordinated movement which represent the accumulated efforts of the past; and it

recovers those past efforts in definite order and systemic character. In truth it no longer represent our past to us, it acts it, and if it still deserves the name of memory, it is not because it conserves bygone images, but because it prolongs their useful effect into the now moment(if this kind of memories are the majority how can then oblivion be voluntary?) But beyond remembrance that is motor mechanism at the very opposite the balancing should be achieved by personal recollectionsimages, that reproduce past facts with their lineation, their colors, even and their smell. It’s a memory impulsive and capricious in reproducing, but this memory does not bound to became one with the action and she consists the association of ideas. It’s a memory that I am obliged to mark we are untuned. Since personal, experienced. But here lies the problem of contemporary, where through the technology lot of our experiences are lived via representative, and those who not, we have reduce sensibly their range, through necessity, utility, effectivity. It’s true that the lived experience we possess only by synopsis discarding the unnecessary. We say for the past that it is no more, pinpointing so, its disappearance, its absence, from our claim to act on it, to have it in our hands. The irreversible states that man cannot return to its past, neither past can return as past. The unrevoked indicates that ‘’been” – mostly “has been” – cannot be nullified : what it’s done cannot be undone. But oblivion can respond to the time compulsion of deed’s continuation with break. This break as an overthrow of times structure goes from oblivions power to the proposed couple of forgiveness/promise. The remedy against irreversible and unexpected is our capability to forgive, to give and to keep promises. Forgiveness has the coherence to disengage the debt from guilt’s weight and in some way to show of debt as an addiction. But not only that. A least it should do more : to unbind the malefactor from his deed. It’s the answer to the unresolved, irrecoverable, irreconcilable. To whom commitment responds with an predictable course that feeds the trustworthiness to the human doing. The inexcusable has less to do with the memory and more with the

mourning as a constant frame. We have to reach to the point to say “to forget the debt” that cast of loss, if the debt borders with error and pens to repeat. Oblivions work is intertwined by all that tie us with time. Past memory, futures expectance and attention to the present. Somebody to go back to the past has to forget the present. To retrieve the present, has to suspend the past and future. To

embosom the future has to forget the past. It’s always in the present that oblivion is inflected. And because to remember somebody something, is straightly to remember self. I will ask you again to recall the moves that you repeat in your daily routine.

Under the history, the memory and the oblivion. Under the memory and the oblivion, life. But to write life itself is another story. The endless. Paul Ricceur

Bibliography

Η μνήμη, η ιστορία, η λήθη(the memory, the history, the oblivion), Paul Ricoeur, Ίνδικτος, 2013 The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt, The University of Chicago Press, Second edition, 1998 Between Past and Future, Hannah Arendt, The Viking Press, 1961 Matter and Memory, Henri Bergson, London : George Allen & Unwin LTD, 1929 Time and Free Will, Henri Bergson, London : George Allen & Unwin LTD, 1950