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, April 09, 2004

I remember idioms my family used, of which I wasn't sure whether they were just ours or part of general idiomatic English. In particular I rememner that we would be allowed some indulgence because it was "a special occasion," and that my mother would often rebuke my father for making something "a federal case." I think, now, these actually were idioms of the time (like "having company"), but I'm not absolutely certain. Another one was the one I associate most with my downtown grandmother, but which my parents also used: they would ask, "Did you make a duty?" meaning had I defecated? And shit was "duty," as in "there's some duty in the toilet." I wonder, now, just this minute, whether that's where "doo-doo" comes from? (I remembe learning the term "BM" from the Hoges, which I quickly discovered was the more common terminology.) Maybe duty was also an idiom of the time? But an atrocious one, and one that ruined my reading of 1) Kant and 2) Wordsworth (his "Ode to Duty"). Also "dutiful" and "beautiful" are so easily misapprehended for each other that at some archaic level my aesthetic categories got strangely mixed up.

posted by william 8:10 AM
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