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, February 12, 2005

I remember my mother's thick glasses. I would sometimes try them on, though I was forbidden to do so because she said they would harm my vision. So I'd try them on when I was in the bedroom and she was in the bathroom, and what I saw -- not through them but with them -- was a kind of forbidden sight, the sense of what grown-up seeing or incapacity to see was like, the extent to which adult life required -- and sustained -- massive intervention. It was all a kind of lucid, crystaline, hard and smoothed-surface blur that I saw through her lenses, and that seemed to be the space, rather than the sweet soft air of my own vision, my own surround, that adults lived in. (Not my father, though! He didn't need glasses. It was one of those fundamental differences between them. But it made my mother seem more competent, more knowledgeable, able to wear those glasses and the contacts that substituted for them sometimes.) Now my vision is probably worse than hers was then.

posted by william 6:10 PM
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