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

Wednesday, May 15, 2002

I remember songs that my Uncle Willy (killed in action June 4, 1944) used to love (according to my uptown grandmother): "When Johnny Comes Marching Home," (although that might have been a combination of her wishes and my grandfather's return from the Great War in 1918: I think he walked for three weeks from Russia back to Vienna; there was also a TV show on at 4 o'clock on weekday afternoons whose credits contained that song, with shots of soldiers marching); "Those Caissons Keep Rolling Along" (although that might be my confusion: I think it was on one of the records I played on my little record player, along with Casey Jones, John Henry, and the Red Ball Express); and -- definitely -- songs from Oklahoma; especially "Oh What a Beautiful Morning:" I remember thinking about the elephants and their trunks (see earlier) at the line "The corn is as high as an elephant's eye." I didn't know whether this was very high for corn or not: when my grandmother told me how much he loved the song I remember that I was looking from their car window at some granite rocks in a park up on Haven Avenue near the George Washington Bridge and estimating how high that was against the rocks. He also loved "June is Busting Out All Over," because I guess his birthday was in June -- D-Day in fact. He was killed two days before his 19th birthday. I remember outliving him, which seemed strange since he was so much the figure of absent authority in the family.

I remember other songs from my record player: "Campdown Racetrack," "Oh Susanna," and "Someone's in the Kitchen with Dinah." I think I got these songs because I liked the song my father taught me: "Standing on the Corner, Watching all the Girls Go by." I remember I didn't know what it meand to "stand on a corner.," corners for me meaning the corner of a room. And I didn't know what an occupation was ("brother you don't know a nicer occupation--matter of fact [bum bum] neither do I--than standing on the corner, watching all the girls, watching all the girls, watching all the girls go by"), nor of course what giving all the girls the eye meant; but I did love the glammor of "matter of fact," a phrase that featured in my father's talk and which I didn't quite understand but which felt somehow very competent..

posted by william 6:27 AM
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