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

Sunday, May 04, 2003

I remember my mother warning me about toadstools in Stormville. She told me that certain mushrooms were poisonous, and that I wouldn't be able to tell the difference between the poisonous and the innocuous ones. I think I was a bit shocked by this -- that the same kind of thing could be poison or food. I was only to eat store-bought mushrooms. I asked her how farmers knew the difference. I think she worried that I might think there was a difference I could tell myself, so she just said she didn't know. I resolved never to eat mushrooms at all -- what if the farmers had made a mistake? My mother didn't tell me they were called toadstools -- I think it was Lem Herring who told me that. I loved that I immediately saw why -- because they looked like stools for toads! Now, post cartoons, it's even hard to visualize a toad sitting on a toadstool anymore -- I think of them rather as shelters from rain. Despite my vow I have come to like wild mushrooms -- and have even eaten them when picked by amateurs. The most reckless (I wonder how reckless) mushroom-comsumption I did was in college. You were supposed to be able to tell psyllocibin mushrooms on the basis of the purple flecks on their gills, and I made sure that the mushrooms purveyed to us in baggies were indeed flecked purple. But how would I know?

posted by william 6:40 AM
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