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

Friday, September 12, 2003

I remember Johnny Cash. I don't remember why I liked him so much, except maybe that I liked "A Boy Named Sue" as a novelty song. It was on the juke box at Chicken on the Run, our favorite pizza place in Westhampton. Once we put all our quarters in and st it to play ten times, and then we left. We were rebuked by the owner, who followed us out. I was surprised by this, since it was our money, and playing the song was for sale. Now I'm not.

I used to listen to Johnny Cash on my little transistor radio, on WHN, the country music station, while I walked Powell. I also remember Tammy Wynette from that radio: "These boots are made for walking...." But I loved Johnny Cash, and a Johnny Cash song coming on provided a later version of the same thrill that I got seeing Bugs Bunny pierce through the Looney Toons cartouche. I had at least two records, Folsom Prison and San Quentin (or maybe those songs were on two different records). I remember that he'd supposedly never spent more than a night on jail, on some traffic charge, but that later that turned out to be false. "I hear the train acomin' -- It's comin' round the bend. I'm stuck in Folsom Prison since -- I don' know when. Away from Folsom prison, that's where I want to be....."

Johnny Cash played Madison Square Garden when I was about fifteen. I went, with my father! I prevailed upon him to take me. He was amazed by the huge crowd of clean-cut people there. He shook his head, saying that this was "the silent majority," in Nixon's recently coined phrase. I didn't know any republicans, and I didn't actually believe that the people surrounding us would vote republican. Later I found out that my friends James B and Mary C, out in East Quogue (and with whom I later had some interesting, frustrating sexual experiences, mainly with Mary) supported Nixon. I couldn't believe it. They smoked, and drank and used drugs. Nixon?

When Johnny Cash played "A Boy Named Sue" at Madison Square Garden -- his centerpiece still -- some old guy stormed the stage. We couldn't quite figure out what was going on. The cops stopped and subdued him, and then started dragging him away, while Cash sort of strummed the cords for a while. As he was being led away Cash said, with great aplomb and in that tough gravelly country voice of his, in cadence to the accompaniment, "He's all right" -- all right, decent, not someone to punish, a regular Joe. "He's all right." He finished the song by saying, "And if I have a son I think I'm gonna name him...after you." (Instead of "...Sue.") That was a very interesting moment. The you obviously referred to the disoriented old guy who'd stormed the stage, but who was still "all right." But it also referred to the singer's father: in the song, or that night's strange redaction, the singer honors his father not by imitation but by reference. Usually, when he promises to name his son Sue, the song reads as an acknowledgement by way of repetition of the father's desperate wisdom. But here the acknoweldgement is by way of reference. But if you also referred to the old guy, than the old guy in some sense was Johnny Cash's father, and that seemed a sad thing. And, as I now think of it, here I was with my father, who it turns out, I see from Johnny Cash's obituary, is actually older than Johnny Cash, though younger than the old man. I always thought of Johnny Cash as much older too, but I guess that's because he was so wrecked up. I haven't listened to one of is songs for decades, I don't think, but they're still part of that cosmic background radiation of songs in my head: I hear them comin' round the bend, and I keep a close watch on this heart of mine.

posted by william 10:02 AM
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