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

Friday, December 06, 2002

I remember that at Congregation B'nai Jeshrun, the rabbi was named William Berkowitz. (He got into some kind of trouble later, which I think had to do with money, and he left the Congregation; he then went on the radio, though I never heard him. I liked his son who was about eight years older than I.) My father always pointed out to me that we had the same first name. So once when I was there for a Purim party or Hebrew School function, and he (unexpectedly) came into the room, in very high spirits I said to him (genuinely glad to see him), "Hi Billy! I'm Billy!" (He may have been the second William I knew besides myself, after Billy Douglas, of whom see the posting from 2/22/2002) This was the first time I would say that anyone looked at me askance. It didn't much bother me, but the next day my parents were very angry. He had called them up to deplore my insolence and rudeness (so, I now realize for the first time, he knew who I was: maybe just through my introducing myself). I was supposed to have said, "Hi, Willie." I was surprised that my parents believed this version of the story, since my father so insisted on our having the same name. I felt not at all guilty, but that various authority figures were just wrong, their judgments fallible. Berkowitz's for being so touchy, and reading a kind of default affectionateness as insolence; my parents for thinking that I'd be interested in saying "Hi, Willie" to someone I would have no incentive to address except that we had the same name. I explained what I'd done, and my parents sort of accepted it. It wasn't a big deal as far as my parents went (except fot being one of those displays of misjudgment that progressively lead to the child's independence: they'd been fooled and this started meaning I could fool them), but it was as far as my relation to Berkowitz and his ilk, grave public men who were of a kind of Wordsworthian littleness underneath. No doubt this was good for me, but it was also a great disappointment.

posted by william 7:36 AM
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