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, May 19, 2012

I remember the nursery rhyme, sort of, which my father recited, I recall, in the lobby of my uptown grandmother's building:
...[something] scholar What made you come so soon? You used to come at 10 o'clock, Now you come at noon.
The consistency of the irony seemed wrong: I would have thought the sarcasm would be if he'd arrived slightly earlier than usual but still much later than he ought to have. If he ordinarily arrived at 10, say, but today arrived at 9:30. The idea of arriving at 10 was shocking to me, since we had to be at school by 8:15 at the latest. And I couldn't quite understand why he was being called a scholar, which I already took to be a term of praise, maybe from Hebrew School? Anyhow I can see now that the jingle violated my sense and expectation of the irony of faint praise, which was the kind of irony my mother, the real ironist in the family, tended (and still tends) to employ. Somehow my father's recitation of the poem (he was the one who did recite poems) made me link him to ways of speaking more characteristic of my mother. Naturally, what I didn't see is that the poem itself was forced into the somewhat feeble shift of a sarcasm that didn't quite work, because it had to both lay out the situation (you're a habitual latecomer: "You used to come at 10 o'clock" plus today it's worse than ever since "Now you come at noon") and ironize it ("What made you come so soon?"). But I didn't spend my time on that kind of scholarship then.

posted by William 12:24 PM
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