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, June 30, 2003

I remember when George Wallace was shot. We were playing soccer on the field next to Manhattan College at my high school, the so-called upper fields. (When walking to school from the subway I'd cut through Manhattan College and scramble through some bushes to go through a hole in the fence to this field and so to school. One day, I was trying to remember a line from Shakespeare, from 1 Henry IV, "You are too --something thing --, my lord." Just as I went through the hole I remembered, and made it the last line of a chapter of a novel I was then writing: the narrator suddenly remembers the line that's been nagging at him: "You are too willful blame, my lord." It's someone to Northumberland. It sounded good as a chapter-ending line. It had the character of revelation, but at the time I didn't have the wit to see that revelation should reveal something about someone. But maybe that's because I had a purer relation to literature then, to my writing, to Shakespeare. It was just the line and the way it filled its own rhythm perfectly that mattered. And I loved knowing what that adjectival phrase meant, just by reading it for the first time. And I loved suddenly remembering what it was.) Someone reported that Wallace had been shot, and I expressed glee. A beautiful, long-haired boy -- Wayne Barrett? -- from the year ahead of me rebuked me: we didn't want anyone shot, even evil Wallace. I was very impressed by this, his longer hair and self-possession seeming to me to mean that he'd be even more radically revolutionary in his (imagined) commitments than I was. (This was somewhat congruent to the surprise of his being such a good soccer player: he looked the opposite of the jocks he was as good as). It felt like a lesson. True: we didn't want anyone shot. But Wallace was Hitler! Or almost. And then he survived. I thought of him as the person who caused Humphrey to lose in 1968. Now it looked like he was going to throw the election to Nixon in 1972, when it was clear that McGovern should win. But none of this was personal, and Wayne's unexpected evocation of Wallace as a human being was of an odd, mid-level importance to me. It didn't have the character of a revelation: Nothing human is alien to me! It was much more banal than that. It rather served as the template for a somewhat important reminder for the future. Wallace's humanity was banal, but we had to remember that to be banal was to be human too, and that to be human might be to be banal, and that humanity was often banal, and that nevertheless we had to defend the banal against our justice and anger as well as the wretched of the earth, because to be only insipidly human as Wallace was was still to be human.

posted by william 11:34 AM
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