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, August 27, 2002

I remember that about a year after Kennedy's assassination -- but maybe it was 90 days -- Time published a cover painting of him that was representationally very odd. His face was made up of collops of paint, as though modeled in clay but not yet smoothed over. The maid (whose name I don't remember) said something very striking: "That's awful. It's what he looks like now underground." I think she took the magazine away from me to look at its cover, and after she said this I don't think she returned it. I jumped to the conclusion that what the cover showed was his face swarming with worms -- when I jumped to this conclusion I don't know -- maybe then, maybe years later when I learned (in ninth grade science) that not only were there more earthworms than people in New York (a fact which surprised me), but that there were maybe more rats than people, a fact which shocked me. I'd already read 1984 and couldn't figure out why the rat bothered Winston Smith so much. But suddenly I did, and began hating rats. So it may have been then that I realized (or thought I realized: could Time really publish a picture of wriggling worms as bearing the modelling of those familiar features?) what the cover showed. Years later I read Shelley on worms in "Adonais" and then years after that I met Joseph Leo Koerner, whose father was a very distinguished painter and had done many Time covers. Joseph had some of his paintings at his house, and the style seemed familiar. I know, from his obituary I believe, that he did Kennedy covers, and I think he may have done the cover that so struck me as a child.

posted by william 3:00 PM
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