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

Sunday, November 13, 2005

I remember how I liked chewing on the laces of my mitt, standing in the outfield, bored. I think I got the posture from Freddie Cooper. The laces were leathery, salty from sweat, but maybe brackish is the better word, as though most of the intense taste you'd expect from leather and sweat and mud had somehow leached out of them, and you had to get them saturated with saliva to feel that they were real in the mouth. But this was sort of like a highly attenuated, reasonable, acceptable version of what it might be like to chew on your own shoe laces. I remember that the taste was insipid enough that texture and resistance probably played the biggest role in the oral pleasure of chewing on the laces.

posted by william 4:36 PM
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