Lucidity and the Surplus-Value of the Moment

Freud is wrong about why we forget. In the Infantile Sexuality, he introduces repression as the root cause for forgetting. He states that “we are born sexual beings,” yet, when we are that young, our body does not yet possess the means by which to make good on that drive. Instead, it represses this frustration, and while some behaviours that he deems “sexual”---like thumb-sucking–slip through into our habits, he says that the sexual repression leads to a loss of memory of that period. However, past a certain age of childhood, we, generally-speaking, tend to remember. Freud says this threshold is puberty, and, after it, those moments when we “forget” are caused by some sort of trauma. Trauma serves as this sense stimulus that completely overwhelms the “protective membrane” of our “mystic-pad” and, as a defense mechanism, our ego pushes it into our unconscious, intentionally misplacing it to hide it from our conscious thought. In doing so, something else is misplaced and a behaviour can manifest given the severity of the trauma.

Much of this extension of infantile memory loss into adults was heavily inspired by the post-war patients that Freud saw—an attempt on his part to make sense of the gaps in his arguments. However, I believe this explanation is far too structured to be right. In addition to the arbitrariness of his framework of analysis, it is undone by a few key realizations: 1) We forget both unpleasurable and pleasure memories and 2) we do remember moments of suffering, and not just out of repetition compulsion. Instead, I suggest that forgetting, in the normal sense and not due to conditions of the mind or neurosis, is actually one of two great boons, the second being remembering.

Ok, what does that mean? I understand that they are seeming contradictions, but, in fact, they go hand in hand. Follow me from the beginning. I set out in my research to understand why we forget and if there are any benefits or disadvantages to this natural process of ours, and, in doing so, I found myself examining Freudian memory-loss through Nietzschean unhistoricalness. It follows that my position slowly developed to surround the claim that we forget because forgetting—unhistoricalness—benefits us. This is where we start to diverge from both thinkers' explicit arguments. How does unhistoricalness benefit us?

Nietzsche would say that it lets us feel the whims of the now and the now alone, without regard to the chains of suffering and history. And Freud says that in order to "receive" and retain our environment we need to renew either the surface to perceive or the memory card of the past. And while I agree that forgetting protects us from a “sickness of history,” I believe, moreover, that it ensures that, in writing on the “mystic pad,” we aren’t mixing currencies—that is, trying to understand subjective experiences in terms of fundamentally different ones. In other words, through unhistoricalness we achieve a momentary state where our imminent impressions form themselves into metaphors of the purest state with zero loss as we have no care for their generalization; we are merely perceiving. However, this is not our default behaviour, it requires that we are not just merely perceiving, but, furthermore, that we are consciously aware of the act of perception as if we were a manager overseeing the tasks of our reception workers.

We are required to “set ourself down on the threshold of the moment” and “stand, without dizziness or fear, on one single point like a victory goddess.” In doing this, we submerge ourselves in a historically-facilitated moment of unhistoricalness, which is to say that in order to step-fully onto the threshold of the moment, we must follow the path of history to that precise moment, and, then, shed its cloak. Only then do we exist, both aware of a sense of preceding history, but, also, wholly unhistorical. And within this, we find what I believe to be one of the principal reasons for forgetting: a chance to live differently.

Let us examine the case of a well-fed mouse, Remy, placed in a maze in a safe, ethical, laboratory. The lab scientist has shown Remy a piece of cheese—given him a bite too—before placing it out of his sight in the maze. Remy is well-fed, but he is gluttonous. He wants the cheese, so he begins searching to find it. Remy’s first time through the maze, he spends a few minutes wandering when he catches a whiff of that cheddar, and he starts blindly following his nose. After a few more minutes of searching, he finds the cheese. Now, his second time through the maze, his drive for pleasure unconsciously urges him to search for the same scent and nothing else. But in doing so, he fails to notice the microscopic cheese crumbs on the floor because they’ve been repressed in favor of the previous pleasure factor. Moreover, Remy doesn’t remember this, because he's a perfectly unhistorical animal, but he’s been doing this experiment our entire life, and the maze has actually been designed with infinitely many valid cues, from scent to cheese-crumbs that have and could lead us to the cheese.

To be clear, we are not Remy, but we share many similarities. We too possess the potential to exist unhistorically in the maze of life and find pleasure in a new way each moment of it, although, we are different in two key ways: we are historical and we enjoy the journey not just the destination. We may use these to our advantage, but we must first realize that there is no cheese or rather ultimate or penultimate happiness to attain—at the end of the maze of life is death. In doing so, we principally refocus our derivation of happiness onto the process of navigating the maze. Here, forgetting means that we experience each walk through this maze as wholly unique and comprehensible from within this walk and this walk alone, but remembering enables us to know the above property before the walk and, thus, place greater emphasis on our presence therein. In this way, we enter a state of lucidity—we become a fresh canvas to be painted onto by life and a painter who uses the tools of living to paint on that canvas. This is what full presence in the moment offers us if we forget—infinitely many ways to be written onto by the world and infinitely many ways to write onto the world.

I’m not certain if the method of my argument thus far has been comprehensible, let alone convincing. What I wish to offer at this point is my own personal perspective on why I encountered this method and how I successfully use it—my own fragment of an analysis of lucidity.

To preface, I lost my father when I was very young. Growing up, this meant I principally came to know him, his character, and his life through his friends. As a little boy, and even now, I always admired the clear impact of his living on those around him—why else would his friends, people who live all over the world, continue to show up for me and my family decades after my father’s passing. This became one of my principal goals in life: to build my own version of these relationships and to predicate them on those experiences and memories which I learned, from his friends, that my father did. Coming to Yale, this left me searching for some sense of profound meaning—for me to feel like, in fact, I was having those experiences and building those connections. And, in doing so, I found no meaning. I was left feeling a sense of emptiness at the sheer lack of any profundity in life. This is best encapsulated by the utter normality of how my favorite TV show Friends ends: with the group having one last cup of coffee before saying their normal goodbye and heading in different directions. It wasn’t until this class, most specifically Nietzsche, that I was inspired with the solution to this problem.

I still remember sitting in my common room with my suitemate, the soft yellow light of our floor lamps carrying the warmth of the radiators across the space as I sat in my red chair with my back to the window. I had just learned of the eternal recurrence, and I was immediately struck by my solution: “What if I forgot everything of this moment after this moment, and I can only feel this minute now by being aware that I am here, but I will soon be gone; aware that I will only have the lucidity of now—of all my historicalness and unhistoricalness in the fleeting horizon of this moment and the nerve stimuli I have now—now?”

And it was then that I felt the warmth of the light, the rhythmic tapping of my suitemate’s knee on the ground, the air of optimism, and heard the world around me speak to me. And it felt so surreal. And even as I sit here, now, typing this, occasionally looking up at my friends in front of me, I remember that I will forget, and I feel the smile instantly break my face. Because how could I not be so pleased by the realization that I can and do feel and that this feeling will flee, and I will feel anew, and anew again if I only look at the books to my left and then the stairs to my right.

The way I see it, the greatest tragedy in life comes from the repression of this realization. Somehow, we forget to remember that we will forget. And we forget to extract from life this surplus value that comes from the simple awareness that happiness comes from feeling, from feeling the suffering and the pleasure and wrapping them both up into life and, through living, willing out of an environment more.

I felt as if I finally began to speak, perfectly, to the world through a language that can never be perfected because the metaphors it uses change constantly and are available in only one moment of lucidity. Moreover, they are given to me by being lucid of the fact that they—the metaphors—are tied to individual experiences and stimuli, and I will only ever really fully understand them now. In this way, the metaphors of my mystic pad form the currency of the moment—their own currency—and throw off surplus value in the form of overdetermining and overdefining themselves. And I suspect that these metaphors which we seemingly wipe clean from moment to moment are never really forgotten—they form a latent memory that is simply repressed for life-horizon existence and communication but that do, from time to time, resurface through that black box of the timeless unconscious.