When the first star with brilliance bright,
Gleams lonely o’er the arch of night;
When the bright moon dispels the gloom,
And various are the stars that bloom,
And brighten as the sun at noon,
Forget me not.
When solemn sighs the hollow wind,
And deepen’d thought enraps the mind;
If e’er thou doest in mournful tone,
E’er sigh because thou feel alone,
Or wrapt in melancholy prone,
Forget me not.
When bird does wait thy absence long,
Nor tend unto its morning song;
While thou art searching stoic page,
Or listening to an ancient sage,
Whose spirit curbs a mournful rage,
Forget me not.
“Should sorrow cloud thy coming years,
And bathe thy happiness in tears,
Remember, though we’re doom’d to part,
There lives one fond and faithful heart,
That will forget thee not.”
Forget me not, Ann Plato
Just Forget It, Anahid Nersessian. Bookforum Winter 2025. John Kelsey’s injured romanticism
“I Forget, a long poem published by Semiotext(e) in its pamphlets series. An homage of sorts to Joe Brainard’s beloved 1975 book I Remember, Kelsey’s I Forget inverts its mnemonic formula, which has Brainard writing hundreds of short sentences or miniature paragraphs beginning with that titular phrase.
[…]Remembering offers to put us back together, to re-member and re-assemble us even against the attritive onslaught of time. Forgetting would seem to do the opposite, to mangle or disfigure our identity by stripping it of its experiences. This is the forgetting of dementia, which Kelsey alludes to in a passage that describes his father’s “unfocused eyes and hanging mouth,” “his memory, his mind” beginning to liquefy. But in the lyrical love story that weaves in and out of Kelsey’s catalogue of lost things, we glimpse another forgetting, the kind that clears the way for its familiar cognate, forgiveness.”
Thal Tales, Ryan Ruby. Bookforum Fall 2024. On Rachel Kushner’s novel of a radical French collective, espionage, and Neanderthal revivalism.
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live, after all. If that seems self-evident in the case of a narrative genre like the novel, it is no less the case for a discursive genre like theory. Bruno’s theories, for example, are elaborate but transparent attempts to rationalize his personal sorrows: after the failure of May ’68, he rejects the urban in favor of the rural; after his daughter’s death in the tractor accident, he rejects agriculture; and so on. But skepticism about the sincerity of people’s political motives tends to be fired in only one direction: at critics of the social order by those who uphold it. The reason for this is that those who would like to change the social order must explicitly articulate their criticisms of it, which then read as political or ideological, whereas those who uphold the status quo are allowed to presume that their views are natural or simply go without saying. In fact, the real mystery is the deeper motives of the people who identify with a social order that oppresses them and exploits them, and controls them so completely that they are unable to see that their compliance with it is very much a political activity, indeed the most widespread form of politics there is.
[…]We have just seen, in the case of Creation Lake, how Kushner’s choice of narrative perspective and character have the effect of disaggregating a collective into its component individuals and reducing political convictions to personal interests. We should add that these are political outcomes baked in to the literary form of their representation, not into reality itself. The charge that Sadie levels at Lucien and that Bruno levels at Pascal—that their respective attachments to ’60s- and ’70s-era figures like Godard and Debord are forms of nostalgia and romanticism—could also be leveled at Creation Lake, which reads like a literary-fiction adaptation of the aforementioned Jean-Patrick Manchette, whose Debord-influenced crime thrillers about female assassins, anarchist collectives, undercover cops, and political demonstrators were written half a century ago, in the early years of the neoliberal counterrevolution. In other words, Creation Lake may describe a period of political restorationism, but is itself an instance of aesthetic restorationism. As such, it not only formally mirrors the political impasses of its own time, it reproduces them. It may be easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, but it is no less difficult, it seems, to imagine a new form for the novel. Perhaps these two difficulties are not unrelated.”
