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

Wednesday, January 22, 2003

I remember, about my pop-gun, that as far as I can see there was no reason it should have worked. Nothing propelled the cork from the gun. So that this was the simulacrum of a simulacrum: it looked like a toy gun that would shoot a cork, but it was in fact the toy version of a toy gun that would shoot a cork. And I knew nothing of the things it was alluding to -- the cork (which didn't even fit snugly in the barrel, but just sat there as long as the gun was pointed up) was just like the sighting reference (whatever that thing is called at the end of the barrel of a gun that you use to aim so as to compensate for its recoil) or the tooling on the handle of my toy revolver: something that came with these things.

I remember this a little bit remembering when my father's friend Paul Marsala, who had plenty of know-how, unlike any of my family, took me out chuck-hunting with another kid and another adult. We left at 5:00 am and went away for the night. I learned to hit tin cans with a rifle, and also gun rules: never point at anyone else, etc. I'm glad to say that we never got a chuck. We spent the night in a cabin belonging to a friend of his. It was below zero outside, and I was surprised and delighted that the woodstove actually heated the place up and made it snug. All this American stuff: guns, pot-bellied stoves, cooking (soup) on the pot-bellied stove. It was like an interesting visit to the world of TV and movies, the America outside of New York City which I knew about but did not belong to. Later Marsala sold us a boat, with a 28hp outboard motor that you pull-started. It just missed being strong enough for water-skiing, but it was fun to go around in. Still, it was a bit ratty, a touch of a disappointment, and that I think began showing me the limits of the non-Jewish American know-how that I was so impressed by starting with Ben Cramer, Hugh's father of whom he was so proud, and including various other expert adults. But even so, that disappointment didn't lead to a return of deep respect for my father's talents. He was still a Kafkaesque embarrassment to me. It just meant that I had to find outlets for the family romance elsewhere.

posted by william 11:59 AM
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