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

Monday, September 30, 2002

I remember learning the meanings of shitand fuck from Hugh Cramer one year. FuckI learned from him and his sister Gloria. Hugh and I were standing in his kitchen, and Gloria (his older sister) was sitting at the table, and I asked "What does `fuck' mean?" "You don't know what `fuck' means?" they both said with the kind of simultaneity that you only get in movies. Hugh then explained it to me, but I flatly disbelieved him until my father confirmed the story that evening. I spent a lot of time wondering how you got yourself to squirt in that situation -- I thought it must be like peeing, and couldn't imagine that I'd be able to pee in such a position. ("The pleasure momentary, the position ludicrous, the expense damnable," as Lord Chesterfield said.) My father told me with gentle amusement that when the time came it wouldn't be a problem. I imagined him trying to pee into my mother. I imagined you fucked standing up, and it all seemed very unwholesome to me. That summer in Bellagio I was hanging out with some Australian kids. (One of whom had a Mogen David on a neck-chain; I was pleased and made a joke in imitation of my father when some contretemps about a sand-castle came up: "These Jews are all alike." She told her parents, they told my unutterably mortified parents, I protested that I was just imitating my father which mortified them more, and then my father explained that it was ok if someone knew you were a Jew yourself when you made such a comment in jest: otherwise not. This was one of those rare and surprising occasions when adults seemed genuinely distrubed by something that I had to say.) The elder brother of the family heard me saying or teaching the four letter words to his younger sister (with the Mogen David), and rebuked me. I think I dared him to prove he knew what they meant. He did, and then he told me that there were far worse four-letter words, and that I had gone nowhere in my exploration of the depths of linguistic depravity. I was amazed by this and asked him what they were, but he refused to tell me -- he said I would have to wait until I was seventeen. (I must have been nine or ten, and subsequent summers he still refused.) I didn't learn the words cunt or twat until senior year in high school, somehow -- they weren't part of our vocabulary. I learned the latter from e. e. cummings:
Some like it shot,
And some like it hung,
And some like it in the twot [sic]
Nine months young.
(My father (again) defined "twot" for me and corrected the spelling. I wasn't expecting this at all.) But I don't think the brother, Alexander Downer, can have meant those words, and I still don't know what he meant. He's now Foreign Minister of Australia, and apparently extremely right wing. He was involved in some financial scandal a few years ago, but seems to have weathered it. I think he sent Australian troops to Afghanistan.

posted by william 12:21 PM
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