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, January 04, 2006

I remember a slight cut I got on my wrist. Somehow I had just learned, maybe from reading the Perry Mason mysteries I loved, that you could kill yourself by cutting your wrists. I was worried and asked my fifth grade teacher, Miss Brenner, about it. I think this was in some science classroom we had gone to instead of our usual room. She looked at it and told me I was fine. I was still worried and I remember that she was very reassuring. She told me that her brother had once been bitten by a squirrel he was feeding -- or maybe just scratched -- and that he was very anxious about rabies. But their parents told him he didn't have to be, and when he insisted on going to a doctor, the doctor confirmed it. I was surprised that she had a brother, that she went to the park with him, that she had parents who took them to the park -- and also that she was being so nice to me. That may have been the first time I realized that a teacher -- or any figure of civic authority -- was truly human. (Another human teacher turned out to be Eric Benditson's mother, Jane. But I only became aware of her as a teacher later on.)

posted by william 4:15 PM
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