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, February 22, 2003

I remember that my father went to hear Dylan Thomas read or speak three days before he (Thomas) died. My father says he was very drunk. I remember also that I first knew about Dylan Thomas when my parents got an LP of Under Milk Wood. I don't remember ever listening to it, nor whether they did, but the packaging was as beautiful as the title, white letters on a black and mysterious background. It was a double album, and I certainly intended for a long time to listen to it. I did listen to some Shakespeare plays they had on records -- I specifically remember Julius Caesar -- and Under Milk Wood seemed to be a worthy successor to that serious and adult recreation, whose taste I was cultivating in myself. I didn't read Thomas's poetry until high school: I think I became aware of him again during my early adolescent passion with Joyce. Someone -- I think maybe one of Michael Clurman's sisters' boyfriends, who also introduced me to James Taylor -- compared A Child's Christmas in Wales to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man which I also first saw in their hands, and shortly thereafter I found out about A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog. Then, probably in Some Haystacks Don't Even Have Any Needle, that famous and wonderful anthology, I must have read "Refusal to mourn the death of a child by fire" and maybe also the "Time held me green and dying" poem. Like everyone I loved their music. But not enough to listen to Under Milk Wood. This must have been when my father told me about seeing him just before his death.

posted by william 7:30 AM
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