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, October 06, 2004

I remember my surprise when my mother showed me -- not meaning to, but just helping me correct something -- that you could erase a lot more completely if you erased lightly rather than pressing down as hard as you could. My mother could sometimes even erase ink! Not entirely, but patiently, with her light touch. She could do it without tearing the paper, though sometimes it would get more translucent, and the light blue ruled lines would also get effaced.

I used to wonder where the pencil-lead (the graphite) went when you erased it. Oh, I remember the frustration of blackened erasers, and erasers worn down, or worse snapped off at the grooved, brassy tasting metal, and trying to erase with the bare rubber that was left, as you tore the paper with the metal that dwarfed it. I remember the difference in fact between the smooth, compacted hard rubber of an eraser worn all the way down and the rough, nubby healthy pink rubber of the broken eraser. And I remember realizing, with all the mealy residue from erasing lightly that the little flecks and fragments of rubber that you blew away after erasing was where the lead had gone.

posted by william 8:40 PM
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