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, October 19, 2005

I remember a map of the Americas my mother and I looked at in a book when I was five or six, which showed footsteps coming down from the Bering Straits through Alaska, down North and Central America to the tip of South America. They traced migration from Asia. I remember my mother explaining this to me. They had that cartoon character look of straight-faced unbewildered purpose that is so bewildering to us real people. Who walked that far? Why?

My mother explained it to me, but the footsteps were just so big and so clear on where they were going -- they knew the Americas the way cartoon characters know their own strange regions and geographies, the way they know where they're going while we have to find out by watching them.

I was interested in South America because my second cousin and great uncle lived in Brazil, evocative place. And the footsteps showed people just walking there.

posted by william 9:31 AM
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