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

Monday, March 14, 2005

I remember a tufted bedspread -- whose bed was it on? Maybe mine. I think I only remember one, a kind of green. It was some sort of knit with tufts arranged in a lattice all over it. I liked getting the tufts in the spaces between my fingers, pushing to the skin and then closing my fingers with the tufts appearing between and above them. I also remember the record-cabinet with its interesting, flexible sliding front. You could open it, with a kind of sense of roughness, by pulling it around and to the back of the cabinet. The front was made of many hinged verticals of wood, and I remember the feel of it when I moved my hands on its roughness. There was something not quite right about the fact that pulling at this surface from the handle at its front really meant pushing the verticals, which is why opening the thing seemed odd. You felt that you were pulling but you were really pushing. And yet the thing -- like cars and bikes where (as my father explained) the back wheel pushes -- worked pretty well.

posted by william 12:42 AM
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