56 Ways of Saying I Don't Remember By Alan Berliner 56 Ways of Saying I Don't Remember: Alan Berliner explores memory and forgetting in this short experimental documentary about his cousin Edwin Honig - a poet, translator and professor - and his journey through Alzheimer's disease. This Op-Doc is part of a suite of short films collectively titled "Translating Edwin Honig: A Poet's Alzheimer's," completed in 2010. The films form a portrait of the distinguished poet, translator, critic and Brown University professor Edwin Honig - who was my cousin, friend and mentor - and his journey through the depths of Alzheimer's disease. It is the chronicle of a man who, though he may have lost his memory, his relationship to the past and his command of language, still retained his wit, his sense of humor, his scholarly demeanor and the bearings of a deeply poetic soul. I couldn't have made "56 Ways of Saying I Don't Remember" about anyone but Edwin Honig. It's the culmination of decades of deep friendship, mutual trust, family kinship, artistic kinship, countless long walks, talks and telephone conversations, often centered on Edwin's insistence that art should always get to the heart of the matter - to the very bottom of things - an approach he valued in his life and applied to his work, and something I kept in mind throughout the making of the film. I was with Edwin the day he agreed to donate his brain to science, for Alzheimer's research. I'd like to think that my film preserves Edwin's amazing mind, and allows us to look at Alzheimer's disease, remembering, forgetting and in many aspects the fragility of life itself, in new and provocative ways. Edwin Honig died in May of 2011 at the age of 91. Alan Berliner's experimental documentaries, including "Wide Awake," "Nobody's Business" and "Intimate Stranger," have been widely exhibited at film festivals and museums around the world. He is the recipient of three Emmy Awards, and Rockefeller, Guggenheim and Jerome Foundation fellowships. His feature-length portrait of Edwin Honig, "First Cousin Once Removed," will premiere in September on HBO. Poems by Edwin Honig "Last Poem" (1997) He wrote poems. They had a private sound. A few were long and ran aground. Some were short- too bitter or too sweet. The rest were wild, the worst, discreet. "The Silence" (1997) I listened And waited a long time For what was to be said And nothing spoke but a silence so deep it could be speech or a primed hesitance of speech to say what's true for ear or mind as yet unborn to take it in so that the longer and deeper it grew the more the unbroken silence felt full "Being Somebody" (1983) He had need of a way to be himself without being himself. He had so little need of those who said they had need of him, He wanted never to see any of them again, though he wouldn't say so. For once in his life he was satisfied simply to be simply to be. To be nobody, nobody but himself, himself without himself. He felt empty and full - not one or the other but both at once. He felt chafed like a child full of flouting wishes, floating elations. But drained of hankerings, like a glass of water a thirsty man just drank. He considered someone odd though familiar may have come to live inside of him. Maybe it meant he was sheltering someone who needed a home. He himself had no home, flitting from friend to cousin to stranger, As the occasion demanded, or urged by the heart, which he often misread. He lived everywhere but at home, where sometimes he stayed overnight. Anywhere he slept he was at home, if he didn't overstay. The city he wished most to live in was nearby but quite far away. Near enough to visit or be visited by old friends and children, Far enough off to forget them all in a week or a year. He wanted to live alone in a den-like apartment, working nights on his thoughts, Or in a big rambling house without tenants and close to the hub of the city. He would like also not to live there but still to call it his home Where he could drop in, surprising himself hard at work in his study Or, having been called away, finding the place shrieking his absence. He'd like to live there and in the country as well, unknown except for The gas-meter reader who'd fade in and fade out bimonthly. He once wrote a letter he thought he'd only half written himself which ended limply, How many empties like me are there left to pick up before I die? Now he believed the letter was written completely by someone else. Of course he was wrong - but what if he was completely somebody else?