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 15, 2003

I remember that my uptown grandmother had a cousin who was involved in a suicide pact, as with Kleist and Henrietta Vogel. A Young Man talked her into it. They both shot themselves, if I'm not mistaken. Or he shot her and then himself. It turned out that a year earlier he had assiduously courted some other woman, but she turned down his suggestion of a double suicide. So then he went after my distant cousin. Had she known, what would have happened? This was my introduction to the genre of the double-suicide, which even as my grandmother told me this true story I somehow recognized as a genre. I wasn't surprised to read about Kleist, or about Chikamatsu, or countless articles in the newspaper (though the genre now seems a little dated, at least in real life). I'm not sure what fascinated me about the story -- or rather why I was interested in it when I wasn't fascinated. It seemed stupid to me, and I guess I regretted the fact that my grandmother's cousin didn't learn in time (since she never did learn it) that her lover was just looking for someone who would join him. It seemed one of those interesting cases of my dead relatives, who were not exempt from the strange European perils that surrounded them, from excessive romance to the death camps.

posted by william 12:26 AM
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