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 11, 2003

I remember the smell of Ben-Gay at my uptown grandparents' house. I think I didn't know it was Ben-Gay till high school, where some of the athletes used it. It was very odd to have that grandparently smell wafting through the high school locker room. I liked the smell, although it seemed somehow illicit, associated with my grandparents undressing for bed. It wasn't that it was the smell of their bodies: I knew that it was some product they used, like their odd tasting toothpaste (what was it? Topal! I seem to think. Something like that.) But it was a product associated with going to bed, associated too with infinite more competence than their false teeth in their water glasses (see post for 3/5/2002), so that they were going to bed in a way in which they seemed in adult command of things.

posted by william 12:55 AM
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