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, March 12, 2003

I remember my father telling me about heart-beats. I could hear the heart beating in his chest, and feel my own (which I can't do any more). He called it a "took-took." I think that's what his father had called it (I think he told me this). Even then he seemed to be wistfully anticipating when the beat would go wrong. I think it was just a very proleptic fear of death, and not heart disease in particular: when you're dead your heart no longer beats. But it's since become painful, after he had a heart attack, to think of the defections from the dog-like faithfulness of his took-took.

posted by william 11:56 PM
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