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

I remember nail-brushes, for getting the dirt out from underneath your nails. I'm sure they're still available, but I never see them in people's bathrooms. We had them, my grandparents had them, their friends had them. They were very effective. The bristles were, I guess, nylon, and you rubbed them on the soap, gouts of which they grabbed, and then scrubbed under your nails. Given the yucchy fact that you were getting soap under your nails, unpleasant in the way that I've described before (January 2, 2003 and June 29, 2002; scroll down), they weren't bad. Sandor Ferenczi, one of Freud's most interesting disciples, has an article about the surface of the skin and the experience of discomfort when you're confronted with its strange two-dimensionality. You somehow become aware of yourself not as a volume but as defined by a surface that is not you, but not your carapace either. Feeling silk or soap or other paradoxically non-interacting surfaces is a sort of flaying, not so much of your skin from yourself, but of the world from your skin. Your skin becomes the surface or the interstices of that flaying. It's unpleasant. But the fingernail brushes were ok. There was a roughness about them, a solidity, that counteracted the squishy glancingness of the soap. Still I didn't like them. I think they always got all the soap out from under your nails, but I always felt that I couldn't be sure that they did. And I certainly never felt that I'd gotten all the soap out from the bristles. This wasn't that important, but it was another mark against them.

posted by william 3:51 PM
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