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, August 27, 2003

I remember my uptown grandparents taking me on several excursions to Bear Mountain. There was a large hill that you could climb, that really, if barely, qualified as a mountain, and I liked to climb it. It was pretty far away (to my single-digit self), and it had this quaint name, out of the kind of fairy tale my grandmother would read and tell me. Like Fort Tryon Park it seemed an old, European immigrant's version of America: Bear Mountain, Fort Tryon (when it should have been -- as I thought -- Fort Ryan): these are names I associated with my granparents' perspective on the United States. I remember also how much I loved the song "The bear went over the mountain," which I had on one of my records. I think of the hill up Riverside from 95th to 91st street when I sing this song, and also of Bear Mountain, though I never thought of the bear going up that mountain. I think I was very glad that all the bear could see was the other side of the mountain: it corresponded with my childhood sense of geographical regions being islands in the midst of the incomprehensible vast discontinuities of the world: not of their all being interconnected. That later sense of being able to place things in space, which came from learning how to read a map, I count a great loss to my sense of possibility. I now know what I'll eventually get to in whatever direction I go. I can get lost, but not globally lost. But the mountain the bear went over, only seeing its other side: that's a mountain that's not located somewhere. I want to see the other side of that mountain too.

posted by william 2:44 PM
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