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 my mother telling me how to comfort myself after a nightmare. (Whisper Sri Anjaneya Swami over and over again till the fear went.) I was always surprised it worked. Praying was different -- you spoke to God, articulated your fears, negotiated your desires. The comfort from prayer, I vaguely understood, was from this kind of introspection, deliberate, admitting. But I didn't care for chants, for bhajans, for invocations at temples -- anything that was pre-constructed and impersonal. So I resisted this trick, this mindless call to faith, for a while, till a particularly bad dream, when I reluctantly repeated the name to myself, and reluctantly fell into calmer sleep.


posted by sravana 11:07 PM
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