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

Wednesday, March 24, 2004

I remember my father's shirts being delivered every week from the laundry. The bell would ring and I would run to the door in excitement, but it would only be a delivery of a box of shirts. But I remember loving the loose blue paper band around each one, which later I would turn into moibius strips; and the cardboard backing that gave them structure. The cardboard was very dark, and when I would fish it out of the trash to draw on -- and I seemed never to learn -- it was too dark for the ink to show, and too pebbled for the lines to be continuous (somehow it was worse than the backing for my mother's legal pads). I remember the curious tactile differences between the soft paper of the band, the softer cloth of the cotton shirts, and the stiff and cold cardboard that backed them.

posted by william 6:06 AM
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