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

Tuesday, June 14, 2005

I remember in Stormville once (so I must have been six or seven) discussing corn with my mother, and the difference between the dry corn kernels that (for some forgotten reason) I was aware of and corn on the cob. Aha! I think maybe Barbara Hering, friend and landlord of the cottage who did a lot of gardening, was planting corn. (Can this be?) Or at any rate, maybe we went to the seed store with her and I saw seed corn. And my mother explained where the kernels came from.

At any rate, what I remember is my mother telling me I could get those kernels and perhaps plant them (perhaps she told me that I could plant them) if I scraped some corn into a dish and let it dry in the sun. I did this, leaving it out in the sun in front of our door. I did this on a hot day, mid-morning. Maybe my father had gone to the city? When I looked at the kernels in the later afternoon (my mother wasn't there either -- maybe she'd gone to the city with my father?) they were dry all right, but covered with black flies, whose greedy buzzing fascinated me and horrified me a little. I had an idea (never put into action) that next time I could use my sand-seive to cover the corn, and then the flies wouldn't get to it. That's what I remember: heat, bright sun, yellow corn, black flies, seive visualized over the corn, and also behind me the wreck of the stone barn or silo which the adults mowed one day and where a giant wasps' nest looked like a giant stone in the wall (and which I mentioned here.

posted by william 2:55 PM
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