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

Monday, February 16, 2009

I remember telling my chemistry teacher, Mr. Reeves, also the soccer coach, about the story my grandmother had just told me (in eleventh or twelfth grade) about her cousin. This cousin, whom I called and think of as "my grandmother's cousin," had a friend who was seduced by a charismatic madman, who suggested a suicide pact. The friend declined, so the intense young man turned his attentions to my grandmother's cousin, who succumbed to his charms and his authoritative vocation for transcendence. He shot her and then shot himself.

This was all new to me, this cliché of excessively tormented adolescent eroticism, and I remember Mr. Reeves listening politely but not quite with enough interest. But it was a true story, and I don't know even now why he wasn't more interested (though maybe I'd respond the same way now in his position): at the time it seemed somewhat natural, though disappointing, that he wasn't engaged by what was after all just personal family history. But this cousin was so distant from me that I didn't think of her as part of my family, and yet I was interested. But maybe this was mainly because it came from my grandmother, who knew her, and deplored what she'd done.

Later the story of Kleist's death seemed familiar in just the same way that so many of the fairy tales and scary stories my grandmother told me were familiar when I reread them in Freud. There was something surprising about returning to that archaic culture -- archaic for me as well as for the world -- when discussing the reading with Paul de Man. And he was no more interested in my family, it turned out, than Mr. Reeves had been.

posted by william 10:04 AM
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