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

Friday, May 09, 2003

I remember that when you sneeze your heart skips a beat. I doubt -- with a doubt verging on pure denial -- that this is true. I learned it from some teacher, maybe a science teacher, in junior high. It seemed so interesting that it had to be true. As I try to remember who I heard this from, I narrow it down to Mr. Weinberg, Mr. Baruch, and Mr. Donahue. It was one of them, I feel pretty sure, and yet it wasn't Mr. Weinberg, and it wasn't Mr. Baruch, and it wasn't Mr. Donahue. It was a nearly lost figure: whoever it was is now a kind of hazy holographic projection of the set of all three. I'm not sure it was one of them, and yet it seems as though it was. How could whoever it was spread this misinformation? -- misinformation some part of me still believes when I sneeze.

posted by william 12:55 AM
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