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

Tuesday, July 08, 2003

I remember my parents taking me to "the Italian Feast" in little Italy. They told me that that's where we were going, and I think that the first time I thought this was unpromising. But then I had an amazing time. It was endless, with nothing but fun and good cheer everywhere. I couldn't believe that a street at night could be so much fun. I couldn't believe anything could be so much fun. It was amazing that you could walk in the middle of the street, and that this usually forbidden zone of traffic and danger was now saturated with pleasures. The next year, when my father announced we were going to the feast, I was ecstatic. And it was nearly as much fun as it had been before. I don't know how many times we went, but I do remember, from later feasts: the cotton candy; and the "Kiss me, I'm Italian" buttons. I wanted one, since by then we'd started going to Italy summers and it was my favorite place in the world. But I associate cotton candy and those buttons, and the Virgins and Saints covered with money, with no longer finding the Italian feast transcendentally wonderful. It started looking to me like commerce. (I remember feeling the same way about the outdoor fairs in Stormville, although we went to fewer of them, and in the daytime. I was amazed by the first one, but later they seemed dry and dusty.) Later, in college, I went back to some of these now nameable feasts, with friends, on dates, and they hardly seemed any fun at all. They'd dissolved into nothing, like the cotton candy.

posted by william 6:19 AM
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