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

Thursday, July 10, 2003

I remember the gerbils I used to own. They were in a terrarium on top of my dresser. (I remember when my sister was a new-born, my mother changing her on top of the dresser and her arms and legs flying everywhere. My mother explained that new-borns can't control their limbs, which I found interesting.) They turned out to be of opposite sexes, and gave birth to blind purple lumps. They started eating them. We saved them, and I think we got to a next generation of gerbils. I remember one escaping -- jumping out of the cage -- and my mother and me chasing it all around the apartment. I thought that if it got under the fridge, that would be it. I was amazed to get it back. I remember when the last one died -- some hideous lesion broke out on her rear leg, and slowly spread down her haunch and up her belly. She no longer ran in the treadmill/wheel with that look of odd determination as she sped along. She lay there suffering. I remember not knowing, really, how the water bottle with its bent spigot worked -- why didn't the water all come out? (Surface tension.) Anyhow, she'd stopped drinking, and stopped eating the lettuce we gave her, and which I also ate. And then she died.

posted by william 12:32 AM
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