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

Saturday, January 11, 2003

I remember that Tommy Hoge's father, Tom, was excited one day because he was going to appear in a magazine ad. I saw the ad the next day, taped up in their pantry. It was for liquor, and it was a bunch of young clean cut adults (I say "young" now: they didn't look so young then) at a party. They were all talking to each other, like in a New Yorker cartoon, except for Tom himself who was sitting in the middle ground, holding a drink and looking interested even though there was no one talking to him. He committed suicide, although I don't know why. I doubt it was loneliness. But the ad showed a different side of him: not that the party was real, but that the staging of the party was real, and he'd allowed himself to be staged in such a way that that look of interested awkwardness was his only recourse.

posted by william 12:36 AM
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