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, August 01, 2002

I remember that after the death of Mao the composition and policy of the government was announced by mysterious posters that went up on the walls of Beijing. (I remember that when Nixon went to China, newspapers started calling it Beijing and not Peking, and in general following the modern rules of transliteration, although I guess that can't technically be the word.) I thought at the time that the posters were somehow going up on the Great Wall in Beijing. I remember that the leadership of the Gang of Four was announced on those posters, and then so were its demise and the accusations against Madame Mao. I found it amazing that people in the night could govern China by putting up these posters, and I think I had a sense that to succeed in getting them up so that they would be there the next morning was to govern China for that day. So that anyone daring and stealthy enough (but I knew this would take near supernatural stealth) could rule the country, for a day at a time. This feels to me now like a sort of parable for the idea of being a writer that I most admire -- the idea of being a writer that you find in Proust and Blanchot: a strange creature who lives in the dark, as Proust's narrator says of himself, inhabits mysteriously not another world but what is other to all worlds, as Blanchot says about Kafka -- but I think the connection in my mind might only be a receptivity to a kind of anonymous uncanniness: it wouldn't be correct to say that the writingon the posters, as writing, meant that much to me. It was the power of their strange apparition that did.

posted by william 7:20 AM
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