‘What is it that has been forgotten?’ Photo: Forgetful Angel by Paul Klee (1939)
Top draw: Kate Cramer on the art of forgetting
‘This is the quiet angel of sorrow and of holding.’
There is a pencil drawing that Paul Klee made in 1939 called Forgetful Angel. It’s like a child’s drawing, and to me, it depicts a child angel. It feels magic. That’s maybe because it is drawn with love; the simplicity of outline (both hesitant and sure) is as mesmerising as the space it lends to what is inside.
here is a pencil drawing that Paul Klee made in 1939 called Forgetful Angel. It’s like a child’s drawing, and to me, it depicts a child angel. It feels magic. That’s maybe because it is drawn with love; the simplicity of outline (both hesitant and sure) is as mesmerising as the space it lends to what is inside. This angel seems at one and the same time asleep, downcast, ashamed, yet also praying. Look at the hands. Is this where the angel is looking? They are cupped, and touching each other. What they are holding feels precious. Is it the world? Are the hands remembering what the angel has forgotten, what needs to be held on to? What can simply be held. Now it seems suddenly the angel is filled with sorrow. And because Klee has called the angel ‘Forgetful’, this angel is sorrowful for everything, including its own hand in it (the forgetting).
What is it that has been forgotten?
Ramana Maharshi, the Hindu sage, said, ‘If you are abiding within the Self, there are no other people. You and I are the same. When I pray for you I pray for myself and when I pray for myself I pray for you. Real prayer is to abide within the Self… When you know the Self, the “I”, “You” “He” and “She” disappear.’ But Maharshi spent seventeen years abiding within the Self, living in a cave, mostly silent. What do we do if we are living among others? We are beset by our own hand in our history, and by the hand of others. We have forgotten that my unmet needs are the same as yours; we share the same wounds. The critical thing seems to be for us to do what Klee’s angel is doing: to look at, and stay with, our own hand in events, to awake to agency, to refuse the temptation to blame others, and retaliate. To choose sorrow instead of wrath.
When wounds are immense, we cannot do this alone. We need help. Pádraig Ó Tuama, who led the peace and reconciliation body Corrymeela in Northern Ireland, listens out for the answers to these questions in his work: ‘What is it in me that keeps me separate from others?’. And, ‘What conversations am I frightened to have?’ Because unknowns so often become fears, he says it is through relationships that the work of reconciliation has to happen.
The work he and others do is often simple, beguilingly casual: ‘What you see here is everyday conversation that just speaks and presumes and creates the shared ground for human interaction, the environment where both sides can almost with ease and gentle conversation be healed into the possibility of reconciliation.’ This is the art of bringing about a different kind of forgetting: the forgetting, if briefly, of old wounds and blames, the pretence that for now there are not intractable divisions.
To come back to our angel: this is not the angel of history, whom Klee also drew, frightened and overwhelmed. This is the quiet angel of sorrow and of holding, who has perhaps witnessed and experienced both kinds of forgetting.
