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

Thursday, December 23, 2004

I remember climbing a mountain with my Uncle Cico, the athletic smoker and my mother's cousin and blood brother who had a lot of sex and died young. I remember that this was either in Yugoslavia -- the Yugoslav Alps, I guess, or in the Dolomites, at Cortina d'Ampezzo or Tre Crocia above Cortina where we stayed and hiked a lot.

Cico was willing to be very adventurous, and so we went up meadow after meadow. I remember being struck by all this land thrust up into the sky.

I'd seen the Matterhorn, I think on our first trip to Zurich, and that was a mountain (one moreover I'd seen in a movie -- not I think Hitchcock's "Secret Agent" -- in which I remember my shock at the scene of a murderous climber cutting a rope, and little else) which seemed pure mountain, rocks and icy peaks thrust into the heavens. Something to climb, something to see.

But as I say, the mountain we were climbing was land: meadows, fields, rock walls, and it was strange and odd to keep finding these fields in the sky. And I remember thinking each time that one more pitch (not a word I knew then) would get us to the top; and finding at the end of every rise another rise, with more strange, aerial land, behind it. We never did get to the top, and I remember this as frustrating, strange frustration though to find that land extended, since that's what land does. But it was so odd to have it just go upwards and upwards, and it made me feel, I think, what extension really was: land but not ground (not Wittgensteinian ground, anyhow, which is neither true nor false).

posted by william 10:44 AM
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