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, March 15, 2003

I remember that my uptown grandparents moved from their first floor apartment to the top (sixth floor). This felt (after the fact) like the slow beginning of the erosion of what had seemed to me the perfectly stable structure of the world. (My downtown grandparents had also moved -- downtown -- and I remembered this but their move was more exciting: their building had a balcony! And they were considerably younger than my uptown grandparents, at least in the way I thought of them, since in reality my downtown grandfather was eleven years younger than his uptown counterpart, and my downtown grandmother five years younger than hers, although she claimed to be two years younger still.) The erosion continued when, I think after a couple of robberies in the building, my grandmother had a "police lock" installed: a heacy metal pole that you braced against a bracket in the door and another in the floor. It was hideous, and somehow corresponded to the growing grotesquery of her own advancing age (she had the twisted rheumatic fingers that you see in some Rembrandt paintings, and her whole body was starting to knot in on itself). I found both interesting (how could the police lock fail to be?) rather than off-putting. At the time, erosion, while perceptible, seemed a very slow process.

posted by william 6:48 AM
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