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

Saturday, June 29, 2002

I remember how much I hated the feel of silk, especially on my fingers -- it felt the way violins sounded. Now I don't mind it, though I can't say I love it. The combination of resistance on my skin and frictionlessness with respect to itself drove me crazy. Later, comme tout le monde, I hated the sound of nails or broken chalk on blackboards, and I think it was for much the same reason. Something made your body feel either too material or too alienated from matter. There was something about how what perception turned out to bewas a stuttering, shrieking resistance to the smoothness of the material world. The shrieking chalk or nail moves smoothly, the friction almost non-existent (if you think about it); the bow passes rapidly across the string, the silk hardly touches the skin. All the friction comes down to mere sound, or a very slight ambiguous catch on the skin. And so all of what we hate is only facts of perception (the shrieking, the friction), not facts, or certainly not significant facts, about the outside world. These sensations were exactly analogous to my amazed hatred for liver: how could mere sensation, perception that is to say of something at the same time clearly perceptible as not intense or violent in itself -- the chalk on the board --, be so repellent? How could one be so badly fitted to the world one perceived? There's a shock there, either that we don't belong to the world, or that we do, a world that turns out to be serenely and so hideously indifferent to the intense but insignificant sensations it produces in us. I think it's the converse of Ruskin's pathetic fallacy: we knowthe chalk and the string are not shrieking, the silk is not catching or caressing or even touching, the liver is not poisoning. So we are trapped in a realm of unreal affects, knowing the world is not our friend, nor even our fellow-creature.

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