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

Tuesday, June 04, 2002

I remember that whenever I was wild and ungovernable, my parents threatened to send me to military academy. This was a threat that they had to explain, of course, and they never really made it so vivid as to make it positively fearful; but it was frightenening to think that they might allow me to live separately from them. Later, in soccer camp in high school, we stayed at NYMA (New York Military Academy), and heard the kids there chanting the wake-up chant ("Wake up, NYMA! Wake up, NYMA, wake up!") every morning at 6:00 am. My parents also instituted a very short-lived protocol in which I was supposed to call them "Sir!" and "Ma'am." I liked Ma'ama little better, because it sounded like "Mom." I certainly won that one, since they gave up on it fast -- maybe the first battle I remember winning. I think this all started in the same scene of rebuke in which my father called me a "shirker."

posted by william 9:18 AM
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