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, July 27, 2004

I remember my downtown grandmother telling me that ventriloquists "talked with their stomachs." This was one of those facts that seemed amazing, and then when I was older I realized it was wrong, and then when I was much older I found out it was true.

We had a cousin in South America, a smoker, I believe, who had to have his larynx removed and had to learn to talk with his stomach. I thought this was pretty cool. but hard, since essentially it involved learning a circus-type skill as an adult that most people could never perform. I don't think I ever met him, but I was impressed with him none the less. I believe she told me about him as a warning against smoking, but at the time smoking was so much out of the question for me that I didn't see him as a warning at all. He seemed a fool to smoke, and there was an odd dissonance between his being a fool and his learning this tremendous and difficult skill.

posted by william 5:46 AM
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