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 24, 2002

I remember words that turned out not to exist, that I constructed by reading too fast: "parsh," which was (and meant) a combination of parse and phrase, and "exterprise," which was basically expertise, influenced by dexterity: someone with exterprise could do something skillful with grace and ease. And then I remember a word that I thought was a joke: shirk. In some tense situation I was being dressed down by my parents, and my father told me that I "shirked" too much, and I burst out laughing in relief: he was being playful, so how angry could he be? But I was wrong. It somehow seemed unfair that a silly word like shirk could be a rebuke. If I did shirk, then I must have been being playful too -- and how much did that deserve punishment? But it was a rebuke, and I was punished.

posted by william 7:42 AM
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