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 02, 2002

I remember that my uptown grandparents had two friends named Vlado -- Vlado Hertz and Vlado Baum. Vlaudo Hertz was even older than my grandfather, and lived at the end in the Hebrew Home for the Aged on the Grand Concourse. He was a bachelor, the first (and maybe only) person I really knew under that description. He was an extremely good pianist, had a very cultivated slightly English Middle-European accent, and always had a twinkle in his eye. I always thought he looked the way someone named Vlado Baum should look, and I always tended to confuse them. Vlado Baum was younger and had a fedora as I recall, which made him look tough. One of them -- either Vlado Baum or the one who looked like Vlado Baum -- was once walking down the street when a baby fell from an upper-story window, and he caught the baby. When my father told me this story I couldn't believe how it ended: the baby died anyhow. I used to think about what would happen if I fell from our seventh story window -- there were bushes trimming our building, but I somehow knew I'd die anyhow.

posted by william 10:27 AM
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