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

Saturday, July 24, 2004

I remember that it was the Herings I think who called the gigantic field that constituted most of their property in Stormville the "big field." It must have been farmland: there was one large tree, maybe an apple or an oak, at its edge, but not part of the woods that limited it. The Herings used to ride there, and it seemed to be filled with lots of hay. It went uphill parallel to the dirt path to out cottage above the Hering's, which we rented from them. It seems to me that this was my first experience of something that people were calling a field. In New York that wasn't a word we used much, except maybe when talking about sports, but even then we didn't -- no "ball fields," no mention of Wrigley field, nothing like that. So the big field was my first sense of a new and major feature of topography in the world: that the world is full of fields. And I think there's a trace of that memory and that surprise every time I read about a field, and I tend to read about them when atrocities have occured (farms are not much part of my reading life). The world is full of fields, they're everywhere to be discovered, come upon, noticed. The sun beats down on them, and they're bugs and nettles and long grass, but also flowers and places to run, snakes (like the garden snake Lou Hering cut in half with the lawn mower) but also tons of other interesting things. Fields should remind you of the surprise of being alive. How can you take someone's life there? (I'm partly thinking of John Bricuth's (John Irwin's) pro-death-penalty poem which ends with his evoking the murderer taking someone's life as he "screamed for mercy at the edge of a field.")

posted by william 7:55 AM
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