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 04, 2006

I remember that my father took me to see Woodstock. I'm pretty sure I wanted to go, but there was some surprise associated with his wanting to see it. And I was further surprised that he liked Richie Havens so much, which I found impressive, both about him and about Richie Havens, since neither of us had known about him before. I think I learned in Woodstock that it was Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young who did the song, which I'd heard and liked. I then bought several of their albums, and had mixed feelings about "Almost cut my hair." I liked pretty much everything else though, since it was so melodic. I remember that Woodstock was their first gig, man, and that they were scared shitless. I was amazed that they would play to four-hundred thousand people on their first gig. And they didn't look scared. (It's only very recently that I realized this was a joke.) I remember that as we were leaving the thater (Hampton Arts) there were people coming in for the next show and handing in their tickets, and I thought about the three hundred thousand people (was it?) who didn't have tickets and crashed the gates, and what a large number that must have been compared to the eight or ten people we passed coming in as we left.

I remember that Tommy really liked a song called "The Ballad of Billy Jo," who's murdered or a suicide, a song I only knew from the words he told me, but which I never heard. I remember how important songs were to us, and what a large social role not knowing certain songs in common played. Tommy's brothers knew that song and maybe a lot of his other friends, and that made them into a group. Hugh and I knew other songs they didn't and that made us into a different group. Even when later Tommy and I were still friends in high school (although he went to Trinity), and Hugh and I more or less lost touch, I still thought of myself in terms derived from the song-commonality (also TV-show commonality) with Hugh as against Tommy, and somehow, though we stayed friends through high school we didn't return to the transparency of thinking about and loving the same things. No doubt I'm reversing cause and effect, but this is the way it felt.

posted by william 8:07 AM
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