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, October 27, 2003

I remember the pointlessness of the UHF dial on our tvs. You spun and spun and almost never got anything: I remember looking for something in the low teens, and then again something in the eighties. On the whole UHF seemed non-existent, but the triumph of hope over experience would occasionally prompt me to try to tune in on a show that seemed fascinating in the TV section of the newspaper. I seem to recall wanting to watch Flipper this way once. It was always a grueling exercise in frustration. I remember the round UHF antennae, which did nothing. I remember using hangers (as we did on our walkie-talkies) to try to boost reception, to no avail. Once, though, a junior high teacher -- Mr. Baruch, I think, who taught us the word "aficionado" because (like me) he was so into Hemingway, and who introduced us to Death in the Afternoon -- told us you could see the bullfights from Puerto Rico Saturday afternoons on some high-two-digit channel. I tuned in -- I think this was one of those Spanish language channels that I could get on UHF, but that I'd always ignored -- and there in very fuzzy black and white, on the kitchen portable, was a bullfight, and a fighter getting tossed on the bull's horns. I couldn't believe it. It seemed both shocking and entirely unreal, just the barest outline coming out of the black and white snow and fog. It occurs to me now that this couldn't have been live; that they must have been doing a repeated replay of some disaster, or some previous fight. But the ghost of a southern truth seemed to disclose itself as its own nebulosity in our kitchen, and then drift out of tune and fade forever. (It made The Sun Also Rises seem far more unreal, like a cartoon or garish comic, and not the depiction of real bullfights.)

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