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, November 10, 2004

I remember the seam on the wall-paper (patterned with lightly printed shelves of a boy's room: baseball and glove, hat, other gewgaws that I can't remember, over and over but stuttering at the seams: and nothing like my actual shelves) that ran by my bed, roughly where my knee was, and how I used to like lying in bed, especially when it was hot and my legs were bare, with my legs pressed high against the wall, and how I liked to feel the texture of the seam on my right knee and the relative coolness of the wallpaper against the outside of my right thigh. I remember later (earlier?) the cooler, rougher white paint on plaster of the unpapered wall against my leg.

posted by william 6:55 AM
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