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

Friday, December 10, 2004

I remember playing in sand, and not knowing what the seive was for. Pails go back as far as I remember, but the seive was something different. I remember seives around the sandbox in Riverside Park on 93rd street, and also on the beach with my uptown grandparents -- Jones Beach or maybe Long Island Sound. I picture them as plastic, but have a bare sense that they were metal, the pail especially. I remember learning that they filtered the sand from the larger stones, but that the result was the reverse of what you wanted: a seive full of stones, rather than fine sand. Only later did I somehow learn that you could seive the sand into the pail.

I also remember my parents taking us to the Lido off Venice, and my being amazed by sand like talc, outside the Lido Hotel. But this was years later.

And I remember talcum powder, which my father used after shaving, before it turned out to be bad for you and they started using cornstarch instead. I loved the smell. (They also dusted it on you in the barber shop after doing the back of your neck.)

posted by william 7:07 PM
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