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, June 16, 2004

I remember getting poison ivy. It was something my mother talked about, in Stormville. And then I got it a couple of times. I remember the Camoline Lotion (?) and not showering or bathing because you could spread it. I was actually surprised that your skin could be a place of toxicity. I had an inside/outside sense of what had to be protected: so I was fastidious about food and flecks of anything in my food. But skin was supposed to act as the boundary between inside and outside. It could touch anything that needed warding off. The idea that it could itself be a source of disease when it warded off the poison ivy was very troubling to me.

I remember also asking my mother what would happen if you swallowed poison ivy, thinking that whatever it did to your outside would be orders of magnitude higher inside. I think this was somewhere in the context of my mother's describing my father "crying on the inside." All these mysterious complications to the difference between inside and outside!

posted by william 12:45 AM
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