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

Wednesday, July 13, 2005

I remember trying to teach my sister to ride a bike. I also remember trying to teach her to read, at much the same time. I remember, or condense, two memories: trying to get her to say B-O-Y really fast so that it sounded like "beoye", almost "boy" and trying to get her to stay up by the cannons in Riverside Park at 88th street. I remember her panicking and grabbing for the small cannon as we went by it instead of holding on to the handlebars, and falling. But I think I was saying B-O-Y really fast to her as I was pushing her along before that. I remember when she fell the frozen feeling of strange impotence that I felt her having as the solid cannon turned out not to help keep her up, as it always did, but to be the thing that would implacably resist her desire not to fall. I remember Hugh and myself actually teaching her to ride on the promenade, maybe a few days later. I would run after the bike after she'd gone a few feet alone, and grab the back of the seat, and I remember puncturing my hand on a wayward spring when I grabbed it. But she didn't fall.

posted by william 7:28 AM
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