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, February 05, 2003

I remember candy my uptown grandmother had -- some kind of caramel, I think? -- that was wrapped very tightly in a very thin or flimsy cellophane. It was hard to get off or hard to know that you had gotten it off. You knew more by smell than by touch. Later I found the same kind of cellophane wrapped around the sticks of clay that came in packs of four (four different pastel colors, of which really I only remember the aquamarine). It was hard to get off and you'd get clay under your nails. It ripped down a little bit like fruit leather -- that combination of satisfaction and uncertainty because it just came apart too easily. You couldn't be sure you'd gotten it all. But as with the candy, you could smell the clay as it was exposed: this was part of the ephemeral satisfaction.

posted by william 5:54 AM
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