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

Thursday, June 12, 2003

I remember a song, another part of the soundscape that's probably the most extensive part of the general background of the sky of my mind (like the residue of microwave radiation from the Big Bang): a campaign song from elementary school that one my my classmates wrote when she was running for student assembly. I remember her name from the song, and I think I might remember her from her name, but I'm not sure -- it may be another Andrea from a later grade whom I remember. At any rate, it's an unshakeable though almost unarticulated song that nevertheless I have a low-grade awareness of every single day, a sort of low-volume Muzak of the mind only brought into conscious consciousness, as it were, since I'm thinking about things I remembered. It begins (to the tune of "East Side, West Side"): "Upstairs, down stairs, all around the school...." Then what? I don't know, but we get to: "Second, third, fourth graders! Give her a chance to fight. / And then you'll agree, for Andrea, a vote for her is right." I also seem to remember "To vote for her is cool" (to rhyme with school) but I'm dubious about this; I doubt cool was in the lexicon of the P.S. 166 demotic. Our term of praise was neat-o. I remember the song as sung by the children's voices of her supporters. The teachers had suggested campaign songs to the kids running for student assembly, but that's the only one I remember. I can't imagine what grade we were in, because I remember that I was sort of thrilled by the uniting of three grades in the song, but it seems unlikely that she could really have been appealing to fourth graders unless she was already in fourth grade, and unlikely that I would have been thrilled about the united student front unless I was in a lower grade, like first or second. I think she won.

posted by william 7:18 AM
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