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, January 27, 2003

I remember that on Romper Room the teacher would ask "Mr. Music" to play. (Though I might be confusing this with Captain Kangaroo, but I strongly doubt that I am. Captain Kangaroo might have had something similar going on though. I hated him. And he was so -- I only realize this now somehow -- un-kangaroo like. The name was a pure signifier for him -- I mean the Kangaroo part -- like Reservoir Dogs.) Romper Room asked Mr. Music to play, the music struck up in the room. So to me he was an abstraction, a kind of personification of some abstract entity, like those stage directions in Shakespeare: "The Music Plays." I wonder if that was the way we were supposed to see him? Or was he just an offstage sound-guy? He was a sort of god of that world in my understanding of it. In Shakespeare, one of the times "the music plays," the soldiers in Alexandria comment on it: "`Tis the god Hercules, whom Antony loved, now leaves him." Goodbye to Mr. Music!

posted by william 2:58 PM
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