remember me nots

why do i forget the things i most want to remember?

A griffen: side view of the mythical beast. Cut-out engraving pasted onto paper, 16--?. Wellcome Collection. Source: Wellcome Collection.

On January 23, 2019

I created a list titled THINGS TO REMEMBER FOREVER. Here is what it said:

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Notes like this are littered across my life. Everywhere, all around, reminders I forget. For example, I have a tag called:

Even still, I forget.

Why? Why, after explicitly telling myself not to forget, do I forget? Why do the important realizations fade while songs like Sugar Ray’s Every Morning play unbidden in my head, well, every morning?

There is no reminders division

One of my fav books recently is called There Is No Antimimetics Division¹. It’s about an agency of people who work on discovering what are called 'antimemes' which are essentially forces or ideas or demons that are, well, antimimetic.

Unlike memes, which exist in a way that makes people want to share them, antimemes are the opposite - they do not want to be shared.

Or maybe 'want' is the wrong word - they demand that you forget them. And that's what happens in the book - as soon as you come across an antimeme, you forget that you ever saw it.

“An antimeme is an idea with self-censoring properties; an idea which, by its intrinsic nature,” the book’s blurb reads, “discourages or prevents people from spreading it.”

What if some ideas have antimimetic properties too? That soon after realizing them, you forget them. What if the big realizations of life, the aha moments of clarity that make you realize that everything will be okay, are self-censoring? As soon as you’ve figured them out, they fade.

oh so ideas have souls now? get real

But Alex, don’t you see, you poor innocent idiot, don’t you see? You are anthropomorphizing ideas, giving them agency and desire when in truth they are simply static things that live inside our brains.

Heard.

But what if ideas did have agency? The legendary graphic novelist Alan Moore of Watchmen and V for Vendetta fame had the idea (lol) of "Ideaspace" - a shared mental landscape where ideas exist independently of us. In this model, sufficiently complex ideas might evolve into something like living entities that, having agency, can "wander Ideaspace as they saw fit."²

fine let’s just say ideas do have agency

Why would these ideas, the ones I specifically try to remember, go all antimeme when I need them most?

Why is it that the profound things, the big things, the things that make you go whoa and ‘I need to tell everyone’ disappear as soon as they arrive?

I shared all of this with the writer of

Psychopolitica

, my soviet brother

Nikita Petrov

in our recent convo:

Bringing up Terence McKenna's concept of "a secret that cannot be told," Nikita said:

"It's not something that you're hiding because you don't want to share it. It's just it's impossible to share it. It's secret because it's mystery. It can't be articulated."

this lowkey blew my mind

Nikita went on to say that he sees ideas the same way he sees people - living objects that he can engage with and see what magic happens as a result. Like people, ideas aren’t static. They live!

There it is.

In writing ideas down to ‘remember them forever,’ I am trying to capture what cannot be contained. To bottle the ineffable, make known the mystery, verbalize the truths that predate language.

And yet I try to remember nonetheless. I’m doing it even now, as I write this, telling myself not to forget the idea that ideas can’t be remembered.

The reason why is simple, albeit untrue: life is painful. Ouchies abound.

For example: ‘Why aren’t I as successful as I want to be’, I ask, stumbling around a dessert of self-pity until - what the heck is this? The realization that self-worth is intrinsic?! That I’m looking for peace in all the wrong places? A balm for the soul, moisture for my chapped as shit understanding of self!

The idea rescues me from pain so of course I want to remember it. Who wants to feel more pain?

But a certain life is a boring life.

Imagine if we just realized the profound truths of life once and that was that? The very act of realizing them, stumbling backwards into them when fighting so hard for something else - that’s the whole thing.

The driving force of a lot of my creative work,” Nikita said, “is doing circles around something that can’t be touched.”

The big truths avoid our understanding because the very point of life is to find them anew, as if for the first time, forever.

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Comments

1. do you have ways of keeping ideas? do they work?

2. what’s the idea you forget most?

3. what’s the one you wish you could remember?

5. how are you? i’m feeling not terrible today which in some societies is known as ‘good actually’ so that’s strange but i am trying not to make it a whole thing

6. what’s something on your mind that you just wanna get off of it like something ur having anxiety about or

7. Have yall been seeing the Substack Lives I’m doing? Gonna be more of those coming, so I’m tryna figure out how to email ppl about them that is both a) helpful and b) not annoying as shit

8. I love y’all, for real - thank you for making this all possible.

1. In researching this piece I found out from the author’s website that the book got picked up by a publisher and is being released Q4 of 2025!

2. Or as the king of saying things that are both true and sort of annoying, Rick Rubin, puts it:

"If you have an idea you're excited about and you don't bring it to life, it's not uncommon for the idea to find its voice through another maker. This isn't because the other artist stole your idea, but because the idea's time has come."