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

Tuesday, April 08, 2003

I remember more about my relationship to the glass top of my father's desk. I guess in order to pull out easily reachable slips I would use my nails. This required that their edges of the slips be not more than a millimeter or two beyond the edge of the glass. So I have a kind of visceral (or ongular) memory of pressing my fingers into the front of the desk and extending my nails those couple of mms. under the glass. It felt good to press down the two edges of each nail (I guess this would be those on the index and middle finger of my right hand) to flatten it out. (And I'd do the nails on my other hand for symmetry.) I've just tried it and it doesn't feel good now. I think the cool glass on top of the nail added to the experience. An odd erogenous zone. But it was that -- I remember thinking once as I was doing this that I didn't get what the deal with bamboo shoots under the nails was as a mode of torture. How bad could it be? And all this flattening and settling and aligning was what I was trying to do: get the sheets offset by a millimeter or two perfectly in sync with the edge of the desk and the edge of the glass. Although I remember as well that somehow I could never make all four edges of the glass line up with the edges of the desk. It might be that if I'd taken all the stuff he had on the desk -- old mail, adding machine, financial books, clunky phone, manuals, stapler, electric pencil-sharpener, clock -- off I could have. But I didn't see why this should be or how it could make a difference.

posted by william 6:36 AM
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