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, October 02, 2004

I remember that my parents, and other adults, would want to relax. Also that my father would tell me mother to "relax!" when she was tense. I didn't understand relaxing: it wasn't sleeping or even resting, and it wasn't doing anything either. It was an adult thing to do -- I sort of knew that -- and Tom Hoge (Tommy's father) would often relax with a drink, so it seemed very sophisticated. I associated it with wearing "slacks" (because of the rhyme) which is something women wore, especially modern fashionable women like my mother (as opposed to my grandmothers); and my mother also drank, which my father didn't, so relaxing and wearing slacks made sense. I think this was my first take on informality. My mother's mother, though, would often refer to my slacks, especially when they were slightly more formal (not jeans or corduroys), and I was never sure whether she was misusing the word. It seemed kind of off, but also maybe an introduction into that sparkling adult sophistication I admired from afar.

posted by william 4:42 PM
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