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

Wednesday, April 17, 2002

I remember my mother's engagement ring and my father's mother's engagement ring. They both had diamonds in white gold. My mother's had two diamonds, which looked rather like her glasses with their (at that time not) retro pointed frames; my grandmother's had one. This too seemed to me one of the basic divisions of the world. Later, of course, I learned that my grandmother gave my father the ring that he gave to my mother: it had belonged I think to her mother. My grandmother also had a golden locket with two pictures in it -- of her parents -- that she wore around on her neck. I liked the complex way it snapped open. She told me how her mother died in Dachau -- actually upon liberation, when she ate too much and couldn't handle it.

posted by william 7:26 AM
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