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

Sunday, June 18, 2006

I remember how surprising "When I'm 64" was the Seargant Pepper album. I think we first heard it on Long Island; it was new to me, but if we heard it on Long Island it wouldn't have been entirely new I don't think. Two of my grandparents wouldn't have been sixty-four yet, and two would have. So to me it seemed a grandparental age, which it is in the song too. And yet the Beatles seemed sufficiently adult that it was reasonable for them to anticipate being 64, although unreasonable for them to anticipate being anything like my grandparents' age. (I didn't then distinguish between them song by song, and so didn't know this was Paul's song.)

In high school one of the year book quotes was from Mick Jagger about morality, I think, that it was invented by old men, men afraid of dying and therefore bugged about religion. Now he's pushing 64 too, but he seems reasonably true to his younger self. So I guess does Paul. But neither seem quite true to my younger self, that is to what I imagined they were then.

posted by william 5:42 PM
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