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

Thursday, February 26, 2004

I remember that there never was a perfect age for the seesaw. I remember not knowing what it was. This must have been when we went to the playground before I'd started school, so that the playground was pretty empty, and in particular there were no kids on the seesaw. I remember my mother explaining to me what it was, and telling me that I'd get to go on it when I was older. Now I was too light and it was slightly dangerous. Then I remember kids seesawing, and they did it right, each sitting at their end, behind the handles and going up and down. But I don't remember ever seesawing that way. Either I was too heavy (when my little sister and I would seesaw), so I had to sit closer to the middle, in front of the handle, or I was too light, and couldn't seesaw my partner quite as I wanted to, since he had to sit either too close and lose the benefit of the full arc, or if he sat at the end of the plank I couldn't really make him go as high as he'd want. They were so appealing, seesaws, and I'm still wistful that they never yielded quite what they promised.

posted by william 11:45 AM
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