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, April 19, 2003

I remember dissecting frogs in seventh grade. They were supposed to be dead, killed by formaldehyde, but they jerked their legs by reflex, and--, and--, and-- their hearts were still beating. Larry Sedgewick I think it was stabbed and stabbed at the heart of the one we were doing, till he destroyed the heart, at which time we finally regarded it as dead. He was also willing to flay the leg, so we could see the muscles underneath. I think Ronald Rogers said, "Boy, you could be a butcher." This impressed me, since it was clearly true that flaying the frog's leg was no different from whatever butchers at the supermarket did to prepare the meat they then put out through the sliding mirror panels above the meat display cases. (Do they still have these panels?) A year or two later we dissected fetal pigs, which looked more human -- all pink and mammalian -- but were easier because they really were dead, and they also looked (and felt) much more like dolls than living animals.

posted by william 2:17 PM
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