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

Tuesday, January 13, 2004

I remember my tenth grade biology teacher. I remember her explaining viruses. My hand shot up! I got it: why they might cause cancer (because they hijacked DNA to their own uses). But she kept lecturing: the only time that year that she was bound and determined to get through the class without interruption. I kept squirming and bouncing and she kept ignoring me. Then she said, this is why viruses might be implicated in cancer, and I was filled with disappointed resentment.

Another time I said I had two questions (maybe we were learning evolution). I asked one; and then the second one was: "And why do you wear the same dress every day?" I wince even now at what a pointless brat I was. There was an answer she could have given: that it was her sturdy, workers', do some science in the lab dress. It was pink with leather patches here and there, and I think it was sturdy, etc. But I felt terrible the next class when she came in wearing something different.

She told us that at age 35 you lose 10,000 brain cells a day. I asked her how old she was? She was thirty-five. I felt really sorry for her too, given her daily decline, which I looked for signs for every class. Later I met James Merrill, when he was just over fifty, and he complained that he was losing 100,000 brain cells a day. These numbers started looking scary to me. They still do.

posted by william 2:51 PM
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