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, April 24, 2009

I remember going to my friend Geoffrey's house, and seeing a pure white marble chess set on their coffee table. Each of the sixty-four squares was white; each of the thirty-two pieces was white. I was puzzled, but then Geoff said that it was the chess set that John and Yoko and just given Bobby Fischer (who'd recently beat Spassky).

This seemed very cool to me. Thinking back now I see the coolness in several different ways. I was a better chess player than Geoff, but suddenly he had this great set, which I thought of as his, not his parents'. He had a great ability to seem to be his family's representative, to have all their weight and authority and insight behind him. I never felt that way about my family, but the S's were magical. Not their mother so much: she seemed the one who was not quite part of the rest of them. And because I liked worshiping Geoff, and didn't want to feel superior in any way, it was nice that now he suddenly had a more privileged relationship to chess than I did.

And at the same time that it helped boost one aspect of Geoff, the set boosted my view of Yoko. Since it was obvious to me that this was Yoko's kind of idea, not an idea that the Beatles would have. (Because it's only now that I see the chess set was an allusion to the White Album. Which I remember was white because the naked photos on the British version were banned in the United States.) We all hated Yoko for breaking up the Beatles, for fooling John into thinking her art was more interesting than the Beatles were. But here was this great chess set, and this new grouping: John, Yoko, Bobby Fischer! That was pretty grand.

And of course the grouping also included the S's, since they had the chess set. The chess set? Of course not. But somehow the world of commodities they lived in included things like this chess set. They could buy from the same cosmic store that John and Yoko could. They belonged to a kind of social Platonic realm, where the objects that people owned were works of art -- where you could just buy a work of art. So it turned out that what gave the art its aura wasn't that it was unique, but that it was an appurtenance of a transcendent social realm to which we sublunary types did not belong. But the S's did belong, and so did John and Yoko and Bobby Fischer, and the group they made up was almost as wonderful as the Beatles, and the S's at any rate lived just next door.

posted by william 5:41 PM
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