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

Monday, October 20, 2003

I remember the chalky taste of Kaopectate. I remember my mother giving it to me (on Dr. Steff's orders) but mainly my uptown grandmother doing so, either at our house or at hers. I liked the big measuring spoon that I took it from -- three or four tablespoons at a time -- and I liked the taste, whose wide-spreading alkalinity is associated for me with memories of my grandmother and her warm, low accented voice (the European feeling K in "Kaopectate," as in Kafka's Amerika whence the somewhat later polemical spelling) was part of the association with her none-too-competent accent. I liked also that the bottle was black and white but the liquid inside it was a profound chalky pink, as though in fullfillment of the bottles low-key, generous, gentle promise of relief.

posted by william 10:12 AM
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