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

Friday, May 16, 2003

I remember that my mother told me how great Kafka was and described the opening of The Metamorphosis. I wanted to read Kafka, and not finding The Metamorphosis, I got the yellow Schocken copy of his stories -- I think In the Penal Colony and other Stories. This was at a time in my life when I tended to take all fiction as, in essence, contextually accurate and therefore informative to a young person learning about the world. After all, I learned about ships from Jules Verne, and the speed of light from Flash and Superman comics. So I thought that there were hunger artists and penal colonies with exquisitely calibrated execution machines. I don't think that it was until recently that I realized that the very idea of a hunger artist was Kafka's, and that it was a great idea indeed. I remember the ending, when he gets replaced by I think a lion, and I remember his quirky explanation for why he became a hunger artist: he never found a food he liked. But I thought that this was like the autobiography of a fictional clown, a fiction that depended on your knowing what a real clown was. So for a long time part of my vague sense of middle and eastern European culture at the end of the nineteenth century is that hunger artists performed in fairs. It always seemed to me that the performance would take a long time. I never really considered the question whether he would then perform in other fairs afterwards, since in Kafka's story there is no afterwards.

posted by william 12:23 AM
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