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, February 09, 2004

I remember starting this blog, based on Perec and Brainard, two years ago today. But interestingly enough I am surprised my some of the entries I've occasionally reread. (I don't reread them much, although sometimes I do to see whether I've already posted on something.) So part of what I discover is that recovering some of these memories also tends to make them volatilize, as though once they're on paper they lose some substance in my mind. But this may just be an effect of the shifting archeology of these recussitations. Or it may be that things continue to fade. although they also continue to surface.

I notice as well that my attitude towards writing these memories down has changed. That's probably just an effect of writing: where it gets interesting though is that it also means that things I hadn't quite thought of as memories -- things that were the background for memories, a background I hadn't thought to attend to, I am now more sensitized to, and am thinking about them as memories as well. What my parents thought about things when they rebuked me for example. What the rooms looked like. What I expected from them. I'm paying more attention to what I see in the peripheral vision of this commemorative perspective.

I estimate, somewhat conservatively, that I've probably put down over four hundred memories -- probably considerably more (partly depending on how you count) -- almost all from before college, therefore from somewhat before my eighteenth birthday. Say 365 of these are from different days, which also seems reasonable, if not more than reasonable. That would mean I remember something from at least one out of every seventeen days of my youth. This is somewhat surprising to me. And I think there's more coming.

posted by william 9:50 AM
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