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

Thursday, May 08, 2003

I remember how hard and frustrating it is to cut a seam, like when you're cutting dungarees (do people still call them that? my mother always did) to make cut-offs. I remember how the seam could transfer its revenge up the scissors onto your fingers and the webbing between thumb and index finger by making the scissors torque and slip sideways, pressing hard into the seam-like flesh. I remember first seeing the phrase "a scissors," in Peanuts, I think, and thinking that was weird, like "a pants" (or "a jeans"). But I tried using the phrase for a while, and eventually it seemed pretty natural. I still don't use it without self-consciousness though. I remember my jeans jacket. I remember tapping the ash from my cigarettes onto my jeans and rubbing it in to make them softer and suppler.

posted by william 5:00 AM
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