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

Monday, August 05, 2002

I remember the white meal worms I guess they were that I used to buy at fishing shacks in Bellagio. I particularly remember the smell of the worms, or the dirt that still clung to them. When they died they dried up and turned yellow. They would sometimes ooze when you put them on a hook, and sometimes not. Somehow if you put the worm on right the hook also went through your epidermis, which was somewhat comforting because that didn't hurt at all and the texture of the worm's skin was not so different from that of my own palm. I only actually caught a fish once, and that was through the gills -- no fish ever took my hook. Gian Carlo, the brother of my friend Daniella Bucher, did a lot of fishing, mainly on boats, and once I remember him coming back with a bunch of fish in a pail and killing them all with a blow to their heads. I watched in fascination and very slight horror as he beheaded and gutted them. Everybody seemed to know what they were doing, everybody was competent and expert in this routine, even the fish.

posted by william 9:27 AM
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