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, March 25, 2005

I remember singing Away in a Manger in the choir for a kindergarten Christmas show. Perhaps we hadn't had formal scripture training yet, because the newborn Jesus was to me just a child-god, not exclusive to a religion, not tied to a story, not different from the God I worshipped at home. At "the little Lord Jesus laid down his sweet head", I'd picture Lord Vinayaka as a child laying down his head, his elephant, precocious, loving, sweet head. It's strange that I pictured this even with the explicit naming of Jesus in the carol; maybe I thought 'Jesus' was another name for the same god, because how many charming divine infants could there be?

posted by sravana 12:37 AM
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