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

Thursday, May 02, 2002

I remember the first time I saw a garden hose -- green and long -- in Stormville. I remember Lou Hering, the owner of the property where we rented our cottage mowing the lawn with a manual lawn-mower and then picking up what looked like a piece of hose. But it was a snake cut in two by the lawn mower. I remember being struck by his calling it a garden snake. It was very strange that the odd liveliness of a hose spraying water could be matched by the inert body of this surreptitious and scary creature, itself strangely defeated by the awkward arabesques of the friendly-looking big-wheeled mower.

posted by william 9:00 AM
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