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, June 18, 2004

I remember that Hugh Cramer taught me to clap my how to clap my hands loud. I remember that I learned about clapping hands -- about applause -- either from my mother or her mother. I think I asked what they were doing. And they clapped hands symmetrically, which made perfect sense to me. That's what I did from then on. But in the 72nd street bowling alley Hugh and I had to applaud something -- maybe a strike that someone else made? I just remember that that's where it was -- and Hugh was surprised by how weak my clapping was. He showed me that you could angle your hands with respect to each other, which I think I sort of knew. After all it was still symmetric. But he showed me also that the loudest claps came from striking the palm of your hand with the fingers of the other hand, so that your hands were asymmetric, fingertips at the base of the fingers of the other hand, heel of that other hand at the base of the fingertips of the first. I always loved symmetry, and wasn't happy about this new and obviously correct technique.

And it seemed a rebuke to my family as well, to the aesthetic of symmetry and therefore to the very notion of aesthetic sense, which Hugh, with his rough-and-tumble tough-guy practical manner seemed indifferent to (as far as I understood aesthetics then, at any rate).

posted by william 11:57 AM
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