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, July 25, 2005

I remember going to see my newborn brother, and being worried, because the first things I noticed were the bluish tone on his skin, his surprisingly long nails, and the general wrinkled appearance of six-hour-olds (but he was the first I'd seen). I wasn't convinced when they said the blue was from the sudden cold... it was summer and scorching. I was afraid he'd hurt himself with his nails, and wondered if it was possible that he'd scratched my mother with them before. I remember the dream I had a couple of nights later in which he'd suddenly grown up, and was talking down to me as I imagined an older sibling would, and my keen sense of disappointment: the only person who didn't have authority over me, and now even he did! But it turned out to be a dream-within-a-dream: I woke up in it to find that he wasn't grown up at all. The funny part about it is (and this must be false or overlapping memory), his infant face had much sharper features in the dream... he looked like he did a month or two later. I remember that when I finally stopped worrying about his skin and nails, he had to be treated under the bright lights for his newborn jaundice, and I was worried again - nearly terrified - that the light would burn him.

posted by sravana 12:12 AM
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