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

Saturday, August 06, 2005

I remember the little flies (or large gnats) that used to get into the bath-water, floating on surface tension, and onto the porcelain or marble fixtures and into the soap dish and the soap, in Bellagio. I haven't thought about this for decades. I hated them; there would only be two or three, but there would always be two or three. They seemed to pollute the otherwise pure and clear water in the large white tubs in the luminous spacious bathroom, and I kept wanting to try again, but they were always there. I could feel very clean after a bath, and after my parents dried my off in the white towels of the hotel, but it took avoiding the flies, thinking somehow that if I didn't touch them not only would they not affect me, but I wouldn't dirty them; that contact was what had to be avoided, since somehow that would vitiate the whole bath; but that if I avoided contact then somehow they would be clean in the water too, and everything would be o.k. They were probably ephemerae (are they called?), and now the whole thing strikes me as so young, young like myself, and like the young flies that somehow stand for that long-ago youth, untouched and so sustained, at least during those days, those evenings, those early-evening baths.

posted by william 9:33 AM
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