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

Saturday, November 08, 2003

I remember that in the downstairs (guest) bathroom at the Sterns' house they had a framed poster above the toilet of a vaguely Chagallian landscape and the word Hundretwasser (spelling?) below. I thought that must be a place, or perhaps a Yiddish, or German word, and I kept trying to parse it as Hundredwater. It would always be there when I peed, and it never made sense. But the enigma never lasted longer than the fifteen or twenty seconds it took to pee, and faded back into the ranks of annoying obscurity until the next time. Later I learend -- I think I learned -- that he was a person, the painter of the landscape, and that the poster was from some show or other. But I still don't quite know who he was or why or how his strange name designated him.

posted by william 10:29 PM
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