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, August 17, 2004

I remember confusing Solomon, "solemn" and my cousin Manny Salom; later came canned salmon. When I had to "solemnly swear" not to go swimming when my parents were away, I somehow thought that the solemnity reflected the seriousness of Solomon's wisdom, and that Manny and his family (related to my mother's mother) had a name that alluded to that tradition. When Finn McCool got wisdom from sucking on his salmon-impregnated thumb this all made sense. Later on, when I learned to ski with the Sterns, in Windham, I learned about slaloming, a word with power for me, like deconstruction and Hassid. It made sense that slaloming was such a major skill, since it belonged to that constellation of authorities who knew how to do things in the world, who could be solemn when they chose, and knew when to choose to be.

posted by william 6:46 PM
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