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, January 13, 2005

I remember the sounds of my adult relatives cracking their joints -- ankles and knees mainly, when they stretched their legs. I remember this particularly of my mother, and to some extent of her mother. It was one of those things adults did, and were competently unsurprised about doing. Of course I learned to crack knuckles later: Hugh Cramer and I would do it all the time, and he knew the various hypotheses explaining the sounds. But much earlier, it was a part of my mother's ambience, part of the way she manifested herself to me, part of the totality of her presence to me, that she would raise her leg, sitting or lying in bed, to crack her knee or ankle. It was something she did, something she knew how to do, something she had reasons for doing, something she was perfectly at ease doing.

posted by william 8:58 PM
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