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, October 16, 2002

I remember the little fabric change pocket in my father's bathing suits -- of the same woven material as the under support. The pocket (it seems to me they still have them) was inside the corded waist, against the skin and held shut by the cord. It would sometimes hang outside the waist: grotesque and obscene, but in a mild and obvious and not at all troubling way. I remember that he once went swimming with a dollar bill in that pocket, and when I saw it I was sure he'd ruined the money. But it just dried out and was fine, and I was impressed by the quality of the linen in the bill. I place this memory in Bellagio, but why would he have been swimming with American money in his pocket in Bellagio?

I remember incessantly drawing with my pastels the view across the lake, a view I loved about all others. Years later, when I revisited Bellagio in a haze of intense surprise that all this should really exist, should have duration -- a visit like a return to some purely ideal time and space of childhood, like revisiting being able to fit under the bed or in the crib -- we climbed that opposing mountain which I had drawn over and over, and saw its contours and paths from up close. I didn't know you could do that. But nothing about doing it spoiled it.

posted by william 12:27 AM
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