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, March 04, 2005

Agoraphiliac remembers:

I remember reading, or trying to read, a book called Autobiography of a Schizophrenic. I must have been 14.

I think I was hoping for a more thrilling version of I Never Promised You a Rose Garden. The back cover, I think, said that its author had been in psychiatric treatment since she was five years old. I took this as an objective measurement: she was a good eight years crazier than the main character of Rose Garden; it had to be that much better a book. --In the first pages, her psychoanalyst feeds her an apple; she cuts a piece of apple, holds it to her breast, and then gives it to the eponymous schizophrenic. My feeling was at once, eeew, and also disappointment at the lack of resonance the image had for me. I wanted to recognize the schizophrenic's thoughts and be terrified by their similarity to mine. I never got past those first pages, though I tried more than once.

Mary Barnes's autobiography was important to me, too, years later, and also disappointing in its way. Now I was nineteen? twenty? and still wondering why there was craziness, and whether I had it. (That's pretty much the limit of my philosophical mind: no "is there a God?" or "why is there evil?" or "why is there something rather than nothing?" Just, what is craziness and do I have it or am I it?) Mary Barnes lived in R.D. Laing's Kingsley Hall and she had gone completely mad, had given in and reached the ultimate--I don't know what, I had to read the book and find out. I remember being more than disappointed, outraged, that at the end of the book she announced that she was a painter. I can't entirely articulate my outrage; I felt cheated. It's like having the Ancient Mariner tell you, "yeah, so but anyways I'm a poet now, actually. All that torment? Pure poetry. I got a million of 'em."

I remember that I read Mary Barnes while I was living at a commune. Where we did have a member who was pretty crazy, E. I thought of E as our success story; here was one thing we did that the outside world couldn't do: happily make a crazy man a real member of social life, not just tolerate him.) One day he came through the accounting office with a Walkman on. "What're you listening to, E?" the bookkeeper asked him. E gestured to the tape player, to show that it was rewinding. "Going back, huh, E?" asked the bookkeeper. "Oh, yes," said E, both grave and mock-grave, "I'm going all the way back."

[cross-posted from her livejournal]

posted by william 10:05 PM
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