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, December 04, 2004

I remember, my memory jogged by just rereading Catcher in the Rye, that when we were doing public speaking I think in seventh grade the kids in the class would yell "Digression!" whenever the speaker went off topic. I remember the way Peter Rogers would lean forward, listening intently, ready to yell digression if a syllable went off, as though being the first to answer in a quiz contest. I have some sense that I was absent the day the procedure was explained. (Or maybe this happened at Riverdale, and it was Eric Grabino, and they'd all learned to do it before I got there in tenth grade. And it's interesting that this makes me realize that Eric as the Peter-Rogers figure at Riverdale, although we were never really friends, and Peter and I were.) So somehow I didn't quite know what a digression was, in this sense, and why you were allowed to task someone for digressing. The whole idea of the speech seemed digressive: you were up there talking about something you wouldn't otherwise be talking about. It wasn't as though there was some point you actually wanted to make. And now this whole blog is a kind of digression.

posted by william 7:49 AM
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