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

Saturday, March 13, 2004

I remember Cai Glushak. I loved his first name. I liked it that his last name reminded me of goulash, which my family sometimes served and which I thought of as a middle-European inheritance that belonged to the family and not to the culture of my friends at large. (Somewhat later I was mildly surprised that restaurants offered goulash; but I think I'd been prepared for it by seeing Robert Goulet appear as himself -- I didn't know who he was -- on The Lucy Show.) I remember him from second grade. Then later he got taller than I was. He was one of the first people I knew to wear glasses -- he was soft-spoken and with his glasses and his modualted and urbane voice he reminded me of Mr. Peabody. I remember him explicitly twice: standing on line, against an institutional wall somewhere, waiting to get in or to leave: maybe a museum, maybe some unusual corridor in school. And I remember seeing him in Riverside Park one afternoon, just North of the Soldiers and Sailors monument. I always liked him but we were never friends. I also remember Jon Sykes, who might have been there that same afternoon, and who looked just like a blond Dr. McCoy, which was why I liked him. (I believe he was a very decent guy, too.)

posted by william 11:46 PM
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