Crusts of forgetting - Dental Floss and Walter Benjamin

I just found my dental floss. I lost it three months ago. Three months without dental floss is a little troublesome. I didn’t buy any more because I felt I knew I would find it. In fact I knew where it was, I just couldn’t remember.

I was just reading about Walter Benjamin’s death ‘by his own hand’ as it is favoured to say for figures of historical import. He chose the wrong day to try to leave France, he chose the wrong place to leave from, he chose the wrong place to receive his visa. I suppose if you start to pull it out further, he chose the wrong time to live, the wrong ideas to think and write about (rejected by dialectical Marxists and most certainly an enemy of the Nazis), the wrong religion, the wrong country. None were chosen, of course, but that doesn’t stop the feeling of historical injustice. If he had lived passed his own death, I think he would have enjoyed the confluence of events that led to it: the sheer chance of it all, tragi-comic in its own sad and individual way. His death, as I read it, led to others being granted the invaluable passage through Spain and out to freedom and a delayed death, presumably.

There are things that escape your consciousness for a while – the location of wayward dental floss, for example – and decide to reside somewhere in the depths, or at least underneath some sort of calcified crust of recollection, the surface of which is the portrait of the memories we hold with us every day. For some people, this upper crust of memory – essentially the reality we hold with us everywhere we go – if fractured and allows surprising things to seep through all the time. I’m not one of those people. My crust needs to be broken by a direct dart of perceptual signification – a smell, a sight, a sound, a word – which pierces the surface and allows an insight into something of the past; a glimpse at best, intuitive and esoteric.

And yet, like the Earth’s own thin crust, there are signs on the surface of the things underneath – mental mountain ranges, chasms, seas of tranquil stillness – which tell us that something lies beneath. Something that moves and shifts, adjusts all the time, never really comes to rest. I think it was something like this – some psycho-geographic feature – which told me my dental floss was under my desk, the very desk I was sitting at, reading about the death of dear Walter. Something in the stillness of the end of the paragraph, finalising the details of his sad and all too early demise I found a moment for insight – I didn’t have time to even think “Yes, I know!” before I dived below the desk to find the small circular plastic piece of everyday dental hygiene equipment.

It is too much, in this day, to speak of collective experiences, societal forgetting and cultural landscapes. Our experience of the world is a different one to everyone else’s. It must be – how else can we fail to understand each other in even the most simple of situations? Agreeing with someone else has become one of two things: a political choice, based upon some ulterior motivation; consent based in the lack of relevant information. An ever growing generation of individualists – not different from any previous incarnation of society in the degree of connection to others, but rather only in recognising the inherent alienation of each individual from any other – is learning that ‘alone’ is all one can ever be.

And yet. There is that unifying voice – the complete, comprehensive and seamless narrative of history, of culture, of society. This is the voice of unified media; the voice of parliamentary government; the voice of university historians – contexts in which a diversity of opinion is encouraged, but where all opinions must work off the one logic, the one agreed set of principles of order. The story of history, that found in history text books that read like novels, that which we hear about, that which we can understand – this is the story of the world we live in, the story we have agreed, the story which supports our sense of the normal.

Normal or average. The jury is out.

And this normal history, narrative which makes most sense to us, can at times behave like I do – forgetting things it knows, forgetting people it knows it knows, forgetting thoughts that didn’t quite fit. It creates a crust of forgetting, under which one finds the thinkers, the artists, the activists who are making the mountains form above them, but who are the unseen forces below. When we uncover them (some dead long ago, some more recently deceased, some blessedly still alive) we label them as ‘ahead of their time’, or worse ‘avant guard’ going some way to denying the very fact of their existence in a historical moment – because they don’t quite fit the narrative.

Walter Benjamin was one of these men.

He stayed submerged a relatively short time – within decades he was being posthumously published and remains today a bedrock of post-Marxist and Critical Theory. Indeed, it is from his writings on history that we recognise many of the equalising forces of dominant narratives in our culture, our history and our society. He encouraged us to be playful in our approach to history, rearranging the building blocks that make up the story of the world as we know it.

So, my dental floss is returned to its place with the other daily hygiene paraphernalia in my life, just as Walter was placed within the canon of discourse we take for granted now.

Perhaps in time we will learn to read the surface more accurately, to understand more of what is below. Seismic shifts, providing a view to the world below, are all too rare, and tend to come just as the bubbling material underneath has passed by, leaving only a trace of what we might have otherwise known in more complete intimacy. And as the world ticks on, the moment of clarity is soon replaced with a million others of cloudy uncertainty. If only we could catch some more as they flitter by, if only.

- by James Grogan

This entry was posted by Neil Keating, on Sunday, 20 April 2008. You can leave your response.