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

Friday, February 27, 2004

I remember The Man Who Never Was, which I recall as by Barbara Tuchman, that adult writer of The Guns of August but which probably wasn't by her. The true story of a planted corpse, who had false papers and seemed to have been killed in a plane crash. (I know! I'm confusing it with Tuchman's Zimmerman Telegram, er, I think.) The dead man is supposed to have drowned, so they need someone who'll seem to have drowned when the Nazis do an autopsy. They get a youngish man who's died of pneumonia. I remember learning there that you get pneumonia by getting liquid into your lungs (that's why it looks like drowning). This worried me into experimenting when I went running in the mornings. I'd let a bit of saliva kind of sit on my tongue as I ran, held up by the surface tensions of the bubbles within it, and see whether I could inhale the saliva into my lungs as I panted. I somehow knew that it couldn't be that easy to get pneumonia, or to have the experience of drowning -- but knowing this, or thinking that I knew it, was part of the temptation of doing it. Of course, as it turns out, I never even got myself to cough this way.

posted by william 6:53 PM
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