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, May 03, 2003

I remember that Mrs. Eben, the terrifying principal of P.S. 166, wore vivid blue eye-shadow. And she was short. All of this had the effect of making short seem scary and blue eye-shadow deceptive. Someone could want to look like a person who wore blue eye-shadow, and still be terrifying. I remember the Assistant Principal, who also sometimes subbed, and how much everyone liked her. She was a principal too, which was frightening, except that she wasn't -- she set you at your ease immediately. But I thought of her as not at all scared by Mrs. Eben (unlike the teachers) -- she belonged Platonically and eternally to her role, as Mrs. Eben did to hers. I guess they felt a little like a parental couple, one nice, one not.

posted by william 12:43 AM
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