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

Thursday, December 04, 2003

I remember that I looked like Jerry Fall. When I changed schools in tenth grade, everyone at my new school, especially the athletic coaches, asked me whether I was related to him. He'd graduated the previous year. I think he was a football star. I didn't know whether to be flattered -- or anxious that I couldn't live up to him. I came down on the side of anxiety. People seemed to imagine I'd play football, which wasn't even the remotest of possibilities. In tenth grade, people who've graduated are like people who've died. I'd never met Jerry Fall and so coming to school after he was gone was like becoming aware of a historical figure (like Calvin Hill, who'd also gone to my school, and who was a historical figure). It was odd to be compared to him -- it was like being compared to the long-dead. (Of course he was just in college somewhere, but even now it's hard to believe that he was alive, present in the world, perhaps nearby.) I wonder now whether this was something I was particularly sensitive to because of my being named after my uncle, killed on Biak in 1944.

posted by william 3:59 PM
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