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, May 19, 2003

I remember that Bob Barker on Truth or Consequences would sometimes (always?) introduce an interesting personnage, before the game got started. The one I remember was a very old black man, who turned out to have been born a slave, in 1864. Obviously he didn't remember slavery, but he did remember his parents who were adult slaves when he was born, and, in the 1870's and 80's, told him about slavery. There he was, stooped but caneless, linked back to that world which I just couldn't comprehend as ever having been real. I thought about my grandparents when he spoke of his (and I suppose their pasts in Hitler's Europe were as unbelievable as his was). He seemed to come out of a time machine. He seemed also to fulfill that fantasy I often had of being a visitor from the future to a past that doesn't yet know the amazing things to come -- airplanes, adding machines, flashlights, cameras, telephones, etc. He belonged to the present day of 1960's nightly TV game shows (7:30-8:00! that's what would sometimes keep the TV unnecessarily warm!), he was posed there for the cameras and the screen; and yet he could go back in time -- he went back in time -- all those decades to the 1870's when in some sense he informed his parents that he was free, that he belonged to a future (our present) of freedom. (Did he really? So I thought when I saw him then, at any rate.)

posted by william 5:50 AM
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