September 2. Eraser.

A rich breakfast fills my stomach and after that the day only gets poorer. No need to write about it. At night I feel lighter, finding the spot on the rocks near the Acropolis where my feet had stood eight years ago, in a different era it seems to me, and that feeling of grasping such a minor infinity with my subjectivity generated some religious sensitivity as I lay my head down next to a friendly dog. Athens hasn’t changed much.

About the Virtue of Forgetting. Suppose someone can forget everything uncomfortable and when a friend of that person does something bad (betrayal, violence, perversions, lies, unlawful behavior of any kind, insults) he will swallow it down and erase it from his memory if he feels like it. It is an extreme situation and we have to ask serious questions about its possibility, serious questions we have to ask in the courtroom where all language wants to take us, the courtroom of personal identity. So, by just simply, “schwupsdiwups”, erasing the bad memory like wiping a stain of your kitchen sink with a magic sponge promoted by countless campaigns on househigh billboards, by just making a cleansweep with our broom of ignorance, are we not doing harm to whatever it is we need to reconstruct the personal identity of that friend? By discarding the deed, we have stopped taking him seriously since in order to take a person seriously we must interpret all his actions as coming from his soul. Well, objects he who is fond of erasing, why not erase that auxilliary idea as well? Tomorrow I will be able to take my friend seriously like nothing has happened. But what this presupposes is the cooperation of my friend. My friend has to erase it too so that he will be able to take me seriously when I start reconstructing his personhood discarding whatever his deed was. Of course erasing can be dangerous since the deed of our friend might be the harbinger of serious character deterioriation, and the deed might be repeated and do us harm. Indeed. But so it is for a deed-erasing person: he can measure that possible harm quasi objectively, independent of personal reproach.
Fuck, how this sounds all too theoretical. Why don’t I just say that I think I (ai ai ai) am such an eraser? Might as well.