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

Wednesday, July 30, 2003

I remember that the bread-box drawer of the counter in our kitchen in 7-F had a sliding perforated metal top to it. I now realize, or think I realize, that it was to keep mice out, but I didn't get it then. I guess I just thought it was some odd not-quite-functional decoration: function didn't feature much in how I understood things then. I didn't like it. It was never quite closed (which I guess means it wouldn't keep mice out very well). I didn't like the perforations either. And it tended to get crumbs on it, somehow, maybe when we were putting the bread back. I also didn't like the idea of a metal sliding through the wooden slats of the frame holding the drawers. It's not as though I hated it. But I remember having this objection to it, or distaste for it, maybe because it wasn't something any of us would have thought to have or buy or own, and yet there it was, so that it stood somehow for how our apartment preceded us, wasn't built for us or with us in mind, didn't offer itself to us as our home, but was a place that had these little alien habits or secrets or ways indifferent to us.

posted by william 11:14 PM
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