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 that when I used to wear my space-suit (my very warm, heavy, bulky woolen winter coats -- see March 9, 2002 -- I would often suck and chew on the strap that covered one's chin or mouth. The chin strap had a slit for one of those long, torpedo-like buttons that would fasten it easily, and there was great compensation for wearing the uncomfortable coat to be had in chewing on the strap pressing my tongue through the slit, and tasting the insipid wet wool. The only taste it really ever had was a salty one: its interesting effect was more in the way it would feel essentially dry in my mouth, without altering my sense of my mouth's familiar self. The cotton the dentist shoves in your mouth, or the effect of certain drugs, gives you dry mouth as well, but the woolen strap felt dry without making my mouth feel dry. William James says somewhere that most of our sense of interiority really comes from the physical experience of our tongues in our mouths. Sucking on woolen things -- the strap of my space-suit and sometimes my ice-crusted gloves -- provided the only sense of dryness that I could experience fully in my mouth, experience, that is, without my mouth being abnormally dry as well. I think, now, that this is why it was so interesting and so tempting (not because it was proto-sexual or an oral phase of sexual development, although no doubt that provided some of the general incentive). This experience of winter is an interesting thing to remember, now, during high summer.

posted by william 7:49 AM
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