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

Friday, May 31, 2002

I remember the expression "The devil is beating his wife," a German or Yugoslav expression used when sun and rain are simultaneous. When I first heard my father use it it I liked it and suggested that the hot sun was the devil and the rain his wife's tears, but my father laughed and said that wasn't so. First I was disappointed, later I realized that he couldn't know for sure the origin of the figurative expressions he used. It took me a long time to see he was probably right. It was interesting to realize this -- to realize that you could somehow develop an intuitive sense of how a language worked which trumped a lot of things that seemed theoretically possible.

posted by william 7:13 AM
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