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1. Read Lee Upton’s “The Forgetting Test”2. In class, we will discuss metaphor as form and structure.3. Write your own one-page personal essay in which you use the metaphor of a test to explore one of your bad habits/flaws/negative qualities.
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The Forgetting Test
L e e Up t o n
Are you the sort of person who forgets things easily? Does your capacity to
forget burn through each day like acid? Do you mindlessly fill out multiple
memory tests online? Try our forgetting test instead. Answer the following
questions truthfully then score your responses!
Copyright © 2018. Nebraska. All rights reserved.
When you’re introduced to someone, does the person’s name:
1) Disappear from your memory like a snowflake in a hot frying pan,
2) Become conflated with other names so that for years you’ll call Kirstin
“Kristen” and Harrison “Thompson” and Ahmad “Amir” and Eddie
“Dwayne,”
3) Grip your memory with the force of a too-tiny sports bra on a giant,
4) Or maybe you agree with Michel de Montaigne that “Nothing fixes a
thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it” and as a result
try to make meeting new people an especially unpleasant experience?
That is, when you meet someone do you tend to turn hostile? Perhaps
this is the attitude that prompted the novelist Dawn Powell to write in
her journal: “I’d love to meet him personally and shake him by the neck.”
How sharp are your memories of your first camping trip?
1) Crystalline. I even remember the bear attack.
2) I’ve never camped. Oh, sorry, I did. Once. No, twice.
3) We spent the night in a hotel after we saw the facilities.
116
The Shell Game : Writers Play with Borrowed Forms, edited by Kim Adrian, Nebraska, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central,
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The Forgetting Test
4) We forget more than we remember. I started forgetting as an infant,
maybe even earlier than that. Forgetting came naturally to me. Thus I am
proud to report that I don’t remember my first camping trip.
5) I would rather be hogtied to a trailer truck than camp—or is that the
same thing?
What form does the act of forgetting most often take for you?
1) A solid.
2) A liquid.
3) A semi-solid. Once, years ago, at dawn, I opened my car, and on the door
handle I touched a perfect ledge of sludgy water, not quite fluid, not quite
solid, and I felt like the physical world could be poked through and that I
could touch another world on the other side of this world, I think.
What best describes your response to the moment you remember you forgot
something crucial?
Copyright © 2018. Nebraska. All rights reserved.
1) Calculation: If I drive slowly I won’t get pulled over, and no one will
know I forgot my wallet with my driver’s license in it.
2) Panic: I just remembered I’m not supposed to be asleep while driving
this bus to Atlantic City!
3) Curiosity: Why is it so important to remember that:
a) I’m driving
b) I’m uninsured
c) I’m using a sleep medication that has convinced me I’m playing
pinochle in Osaka, Japan?
4) In the movie Eraserhead erasers are made from the main character’s brain.
Proust’s famously detailed recollection of his childhood—its every particular—
was spurred by the taste and scent of a madeleine dipped in tea. Is your capacity
to remember heightened by:
1) Feeling the texture of your old grade school uniform against your skin?
2) Opening your first diary with a tiny key?
3) Your high school yearbook?
4) An ability to lie?
5) The sight of a snow cone in the hand of a grinning clown?
The Shell Game : Writers Play with Borrowed Forms, edited by Kim Adrian, Nebraska, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central,
http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csub/detail.action?docID=5288449.
Created from csub on 2022-10-17 15:42:20.
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Lee Upton
Forgetting, like memory, is made partly of the imagination; forgetting prunes
memory to create another, sturdier, more well-defined, more muscular narrative.
1) I agree.
2) I agree somewhat.
3) I don’t think so.
4) If Oliver Sacks says so (“It is startling to realize that some of our most
cherished memories may never have happened—or have happened to
someone else”).
5) You lost me at the word prunes.
If memory is mother of the muses, then:
1) Forgetting is the daughter/son/grandchild/grandmother/ornery uncle of
the muses.
2) Forgetting is the forgotten muse.
3) Forgetting is a god, a cousin to Bacchus, and the cast-off inventor of
stupefying after-dinner drinks.
4) Forgetting is the power of an untold story, an alternative version, a secret
account. For example, what if there was a forgotten story about the Judgment of Paris? What if instead of choosing from among three goddesses,
Paris chose from among three gods: Mars, the god of war; Vulcan, the
god of craftsmanship; or Mercury, the god of commerce? Paris would
have chosen war—which requires repression and denial and subsumes
craftsmanship and commerce for its own purposes. And depends on the
power of our forgetting the nature of war. Our powerful forgetting.
4) Forgetting is a river in hell.
Copyright © 2018. Nebraska. All rights reserved.
If forgetting is a terrain, it is:
1) A desert.
2) Swampland.
3) Mountainous.
4) Farmland. When something comes into memory where has it been?
Forgetting is like the soil from which memories spring . . . seeds planted
in the loam of forgetfulness.
5) A verdant forest that you can’t see because of the trees.
The Shell Game : Writers Play with Borrowed Forms, edited by Kim Adrian, Nebraska, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central,
http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csub/detail.action?docID=5288449.
Created from csub on 2022-10-17 15:42:20.
The Forgetting Test
6) Forgetting may more profitably be considered an aquatic phenomenon.
We forget so that memory can do its work, arising from the ocean of the
forgotten like a new island. The joy of re-remembering requires forgetting.
Hyperthymesia—the rare ability to remember one’s own personal life in incredible detail over many years—would:
1) Be wonderful!
2) Frighten me halfway to death.
3) Make it possible at last to win an argument.
4) I remember the first time I heard the word hyperthymesia. It was August
2, a Tuesday, and I was wearing my gym uniform, and my lunch consisted
of an olive loaf sandwich, an overripe banana, and one of those hostess
snowball desserts with the marshmallow lid that you peel off like it’s your
own little pink igloo, which reminds me of August 25, 1996, which was a
Sunday, and I was listening to “Macarena” by Los del Río when . . .
5) It’s simple. Some things are worth forgetting. Even so, that may mean you
remember them and record them in your journal. I can’t remember if I
mentioned the novelist Dawn Powell earlier. Did I? At any rate Dawn Powell knew this well. She hated a date on the calendar. Referring to January 26,
1938, she wrote: “For no reason at all I hated this day as if it was a person—
its wind, its insecurity, its flabbiness, its hints of an insane universe.”
Copyright © 2018. Nebraska. All rights reserved.
What militates against forgetting?
1) Grief: during the eulogy the priest said of the deeply loved woman we
were mourning, “She’s on her way to heaven.” The widower interrupted
and said, “She’s already there.”
2) Censorship: I won’t forget what you’re trying to deny me.
3) Imagination: revenge on memory’s clinging dependency to the illusions
of actuality.
4) Telling yourself again and again: Don’t forget! Recording a reminder.
Stating your intention to a personal enemy who will mock you in front of
your friends if you forget. Hiring a personal memory trainer.
5) Acceptance.
6) Gratitude.
The Shell Game : Writers Play with Borrowed Forms, edited by Kim Adrian, Nebraska, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central,
http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csub/detail.action?docID=5288449.
Created from csub on 2022-10-17 15:42:20.
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Lee Upton
Your Score:
Forget about scoring yourself. I have. Are you being competitive about forgetting? Forget about it. Forgetting always wins. Anyway, who would be so
arrogant as to score forgetting for you? Not me!
Forgetting: a mystery of our lives associated with sadness and affliction and
aligned with disease and decay, with fears of no longer being able to bring to
mind what we treasure about the ones we’ve loved, their faces and habits and
words. And yet forgetting is memory’s accomplice, and out of forgetting’s depths
memory rises. Forgive and forget? So unlikely. More likely: forget and forget.
How to conceptualize this absence that may in some instances be painful and
may in other instances make our minds bearable?
The forgetting and the forgotten. The untold stories of those excluded. The lost
languages. The lost rituals. The extinct animals. The dusky sea sparrow in a
bottle in a natural history museum. The extinct song of the dusky sea sparrow.
I once met a woman who told me she was married to a minister and that her
husband preferred funerals to weddings. I was surprised and asked why. She
said, “Because at funerals people listen to him.”
Copyright © 2018. Nebraska. All rights reserved.
Her words made me remember that I’d forgotten how much I like weddings;
how weddings enshrine a pledge against loss and small-mindedness in favor
of loyalty and our sympathetic angels, the ones most likely to raise the sword
of forgetfulness against our more cynical natures, against our remembering
too vividly the flaws of others.
How to make peace with the sort of forgetting that is itself a form of peace?
How to admit the other wages of forgetting? Attention to our lives includes
attention to the act of forgetting. The lingering mystery of forgetting and of
the ever-increasing forgotten.
The last dusky seaside sparrow, weighing one ounce, blind in one eye, in captivity, possibly as old as thirteen—which is very old for a sparrow, as if he
intended to live as long as he could for his forgotten kind—died on June 17, 1987.
The Shell Game : Writers Play with Borrowed Forms, edited by Kim Adrian, Nebraska, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central,
http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csub/detail.action?docID=5288449.
Created from csub on 2022-10-17 15:42:20.
Frame, in the form of a test that the reader would take, a personal essay about . . .
Procrastination, overthinking, being easily stressed, talking over people, being too serious, not being
able to schedule, being quick tempered, being insecure, getting stuck in grief, being impatient, poor
multitasker, trying to have life figured out, maintaining mental health, biting nails, being emotionally
transparent with facial expressions, being bad with finances, being too concerned with what others
think, bad time management, being indecisive, electronic addiction,
In terms of tone (and the emotions/perspectives of voice), your essay will use a formal tone combined
with tone(s) of . . .
Humor, humble/humility, sarcasm, self-reflective, optimistic, melancholic, blunt, angry!, persuasive,
colloquial/conversational, sad !
#, excited!, transparent/confessional, judgmental, patient, cynical
”
In terms of figurative language (in this case metaphors and similes) what will you compare/equate?
A metaphor is when you say one thing is another (that it literally isn’t, but you want to show how they
have something deeper in common). Lee Upton uses metaphor when he asks what kind of landscape
forgetfulness is? Is it a forest? An ocean? These are metaphors.
A simile is when you, the writer, uses “like” or “as” to make a more narrow comparison between two
unlike things. Lee Upton uses a simile when he asks, “When you’re introduced to someone, does the
person’s name: 1) Disappear from your memory like a snowflake in a hot frying pan.” Here, he compares
forgetting a person’s name to a snowflake melting in a frying pan.
In my (your) essay(s), I might use a metaphor or simile comparing or equating these two
things/ideas/objects:
Indecisiveness = fork in the road
Trying to fill a schedule = trying to fill a box when moving / symphony
Talking over people = slapping them
My brain = dumpster fire fueled by cow manure
Procrastination = a credit card
Being too serious = a brick wall
Trying to figure out life = running a marathon
Being stuck in grief = a fly in a glue trap
Bad time management = old, bitter, cold gas station coffee
Letting my wife have the last word in an argument = putting alcohol on a papercut
What specific objects, details, physical THINGS will you use in your essay? What images will you use?
(visual/see, auditory/hear, tactile/touch, gustatory/taste, olfactory/smell). The more specific the essay
is, the more convincing it will be for the reader
Jazz as both relaxing (specific song?) and chaotic (specific song?)
Lily, whose face turns red and whose nostrils flare when I interrupt her
60 grit sandpaper (rough!)
Putting your head on their chest to check for a heartbeat
Subtext and layers of meaning = Your essay will be about the negative quality, but you will also explore
concepts of . . . (similar to how Lee Upton’s essay about forgetting as a “weakness” was also about
memory, psychology, mythology, extinction, war, trauma, the positive aspects of forgetting)
Anger, patience, time, procrastination, being overextended, trying to do too much, fear of missing out
(FOMO), learning how to let go and relax, necessity of letting go, nostalgia, horror of the flesh,
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