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, March 30, 2004

I remember rusty water. I remember the first time I noticed it, and remember feeling mildly relieved when my mother said, "Oh, that's rusty water; just let the tub run for a while." The water was always rusty when we got back from Europe in August, and I remember thinking of that as part of what it meant to be back in our hot apartment at night, part of the way home had been waiting for us, perdurable, there, steeped in the heat that was now everywhere, as though the heat itself were the accumulation of the time we were away in a magical place. Somehow that accumulation of time, heat, gas fumes and grinding gears from the busses, and rusty water felt like a kind of faithfulness or loyalty on the part of the city, and although I longed to be back in Italy it made me happy all the same.

posted by william 11:08 PM
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