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

Tuesday, July 07, 2009

I remember, after we'd seen a Chaplin movie, maybe a double-feature, my father telling me that Chaplin was as old as my grandfather but that he had a son who was my age.

I liked the idea, I think because of the complex ricochet of youth that it produced: Chaplin was young (on screen), like my father, and he had a young son, like me, and so my grandfather got to be young, like him and my father, at the same time as his son got to be the age of my father (since their fathers were born in the same year), which is to say the age that Chaplin was on screen, but being that age was really being 11, like me, so that somehow Chaplin was eleven too (as my grandfather and Chaplin both were in 1900, a fact that I always thought about which allowed his remote youth to come vividly alive for me, since I knew what it was like to be eleven, and also that 1900 was a significant milestone), and if he could be eleven, now, in his old age, then maybe my grandfather would live forever.

posted by William 11:16 AM
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