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

Tuesday, January 14, 2003

I remember the school play. In third grade? All the teachers wrote it together. It was about the reconciliation of the fear and suspicion among the wolves and the rabbits. I was a wolf. There were five major parts, of which I remember Hugh Cramer got one: the boy who adventures among them and reconciles them. I ended up knowing the whole play by heart, and recited it to my poor uptown grandmother. But (like most of us) I only had one line. The leader of the wolves, played (I swear) by Daniel Wolf, incited us to the arts of peace. We crouched behind him in a row, and popped up one by one. The kid next to me stood and cued me with "We don't mean them any harm." Me: "We want to be their friends." Daniel: "Then we must...." what? Insist on making our good intentions known in some way. I remember being very impressed by the costumes the teachers made us out of the creamy drawing paper and crayons we used. I always missed my cue. On the matinee performance I hit it, and was very happy. But the later performance (after school?) I missed it again, and the teachers who were watching me in the front row made large prompting gestures, and I leaped up and said my line, averting disaster.

posted by william 7:07 AM
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