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, January 05, 2004

I remember how often I used to press a glass up against my mouth and suck out enough air to make a vacuum that would hold the glass on. I liked the ones with thinner rims because I liked to feel them digging into my face in a circle around my mouth. I could never sustain that experience by just inhaling, though. The glass would start coming loose, and eventually would drop off, in a disappointingly gentle way. I remember the kind of stuttering breaths I would take to try to keep the glass on. But the best part of the feeling was the initial clamping, when my hand and my breath would pull it hard into my face -- hard enough, alas, to distort the seal that the glass made and cause it to start loosening.

posted by william 9:08 PM
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