I remember / je me souviens

I remember / je me souviens

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For those limbic bursts of nostalgia, invented by Proust, miniaturized by Nicholson Baker, and freeze-dried by Joe Brainard in his I remember and by Georges Perec in his Je me souviens.

But there are no fractions, the world is an integer
Like us, and like us it can neither stand wholly apart nor disappear.
When one is young it seems like a very strange and safe place,
But now that I have changed it feels merely odd, cold
And full of interest.
--John Ashbery, "A Wave"

Sometimes I sense that to put real confidence in my memory I have to get to the end of all rememberings. That seems to say that I forego remembering. And now that strikes me as an accurate description of what it is to have confidence in one's memory.
--Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason

Thursday, May 16, 2002

I remember Africa Addio, a book (by two authors: already interesting, and I think maybe I thought it would be like Nordoff and Hall's Mutiny on the Bountyseries) that for some reason was on a kitchen shelf in our apartment. Someone must have forgotten it there. It was a kind of documentary of pornographically obscene violence about the African wars of liberation and control in the early sixties. It was basically a compendium of unbelievably violent acts, mostly perpetrated against women, but not all of them sexualized. I think eventually my fascination was overwhelmed by my horror. Fascinating: one person -- a priest as I recall -- had his liver cut out and had to watch his murderer eat it, until he died forty-five minutes later. Fascinating because I had no real idea what this could mean, but it was interesting that you could survive at least 45 minutes without an essential organ. At the time I still had a theory that when you got sick things got better with the passage of time. So if you survived any trauma you ought to improve. (The death of Bobby Kennedy was maybe the first thing to disabuse me of this notion. I remember that the edition of the New York Times that we got reported in a banner headline that he his condition was "extremely critical." I found out he'd died when I got to school. So I expected the next day's Times to report his death, but they were already on to its consequences. In the same way, no edition of the Times in Ithaca New York carried Michel Foucault's obituary, which I eventually read on microfilm.) Now much else has disabused me of this notion as well. The horror of the book was too great for me to want to recollect it.

posted by william 7:13 AM
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