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, August 07, 2003

I remember my parents' pastel bed-spread, pinkish mauve with broad satin piping which I didn't get. It was like their good table cloth, which I think was a kind of beige-lilac and also as I recall it had that piping, though I wonder if this is true. It had a kind of authority to it -- maybe because I associate it with the extremely bright lights that my father set up when he filmed interiors, which always meant parties at our apartment. The good table cloth would come out, and it would look special and knowing and intrinsically pristine in the parabolic flood-lights, a table cloth that had been posed by my father. I don't think that I ever ate off it myself, though I remember it being put out for guests. I think the time my mother made croques-monsieur, she served them on that table-cloth. I have no idea where it is now: when they moved it didn't seem to become part of whatever mode of fanciness belonged to the new apartment.

posted by william 1:11 AM
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