Thinking and Forgetting

Thinking is forgetting. Only in forgetting can thought be born. We think because we forget. Thinking generalizes, synthesizes, eliminates peculiarities, but only as forgetting enables it. Forgetting traverses thought with the same intensity as memory. Neither forgetting nor memory is absolute; the capacity for thinking rests upon this notion. Both forgetting and memory must counteract one another through their interaction in thinking, so neither one may overcome the other. Thus as there can be no thought without forgetting, there too cannot be thought without memory, without its flashes. Memory coats our every thought, our every generalized remembrance with that personal, individual, unique fragrance that makes it our own. Forgetting may engender thought, thought may be subordinated to the arbitrariness of forgetfulness, but the senses are devoted to memory, to the preservation of that which logical thought, subservient to forgetting, attempts to suppress. It is out of this interaction, in this interaction itself, between a forgetting that spurs logical thought as surrogate memory and the memory of the senses that resist generalization, that thinking proper occurs, individual thinking, creative thinking, free thinking, thinking in itself, unbridled and innocent like a child. Harrison Mujica-Jenkins

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