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

Monday, May 05, 2003

I remember that my father got me some puppets and put on puppet shows from behind a chair. They were animals with long limp hollow bodies and rigid heads. There was fabric inside and outside the head cavity, and you put two fingers inside the head and two in the arms or fins or wings or whatever. I remember the surprise I felt about the rigid material in the heads -- you could feel through the fabric that it was hard but crumbly. I don't know whether it actually crumbled -- the dust would have been caught by the fabric -- but it felt as though it did. It was a very disturbing feeling, and a tempting one as well. The roughness of whatever it was made of asked you to smooth it out, and you ran your finger hard around inside the rim at the base of the puppet skull, and felt, not heard, the sound of that crumbly stuff, but every effort to smooth it out seemed just to reproduce its roughness. Puppets today seem to be made of hard plastic and are neither as tempting nor as disturbing.

posted by william 7:12 AM
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