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, October 31, 2005

I remember the firecracker hampers seemed to always have one unfamiliar item.

I remember that we put six candles on the balcony, and six on the gate. The one year we had diyas, we ran out of oil.

I remember that no one ever ate the Diwali sweets.

I remember getting old newspapers out for crackers, and reading them instead.

I remember not liking the name for twinkling stars. Till I could read, I knew them by a Telugu name... which I can't recall now. But it implied, more appropriately, something much brighter than twinkling stars.

I remember where we discarded our sparklers till next morning's cleaning-up. One time, somebody (the watchman?) rooted them vertically into the soil. So in the morning: a neatly laid out plantation of burnt sparklers among the vines. And I think it had rained over the night, so vine and cracker were freshly rising up from the fertile, irrigated ground. It must have been evocative enough at the time that I got into a yearly ritual of planting them and then plucking them out in the morning.

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