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

Wednesday, June 18, 2003

I remember when Elton John's album with "Your Song" came out how much everyone liked it. In fact, our seventh grade English teacher taught it as a poem. He typed it up and xeroxed it and we studied it in class. (This was the same classroom, at the Franklin School, where I read the New York Times about Robert Kennedy's assassination. Our paper called his condition "Extremely critical," but a later edition, that someone else brought in, had him dead. I remember that among his last words were "Please don't move me.") I remember that as a poem I could see that it didn't work, though our English teacher wanted love for Elton John to be common ground among us. I accepted it as common ground, but it still seemed rather uninteresting terrain, which disappointed me.

The same teacher -- I think it was the same teacher; I don't remember his name (or their names) -- wanted to talk to me about the creative writing I was doing, and which was (for a seventh grader) intense and powerful. We had a conversation after class in which he asked why my writing was so grim: was I upset about something? I remember I'd written a piece about an old man and his unhappiness at being old. Age had spotted his head with brown patches, I recall writing. My mother's eyes welled up when she read it: I remember her lying in bed and her voice catching. I was pleased with myself, but also surprised and not quite sure that I liked the effect of moving someone in the real world rather than writing something that gave the impression of being moving, just as what I read gave me the impression of being moving. My English teacher probed my mood for a little while, and then said with a kind of uncertain but hopeful relief: "So you're not, you know, thinking about....?" making a gesture of shooting himself in the head. This was not quite the same reaction as my mother's, but still was again a surprisingly real response to fiction. Thinking about it now I'm equally impressed and disturbed that he thought to follow up on my mood: impressed that he did it; disturbed that he relied on his own judgment that I was ok, if he really was worried.

posted by william 10:04 AM
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