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, January 16, 2006

I remember the way I learned certain idioms through the outside world's presumption that I already knew them. In particular I remember that in fifth grade, I think, we were reading some article, maybe in Hi-Lites or even Reader's Digest, in which the explanation of the idiom "pulling your leg" was given. I don't remember the explanation, but I do remember that the article said something like, Pulling someone's leg means fooling someone a joke, or telling them a tall tale (another idiom I remember learning in seventh grade), because.... But it was the first part of the sentence that was the important news to me.

I remember there was a primitive, energetic, school-age drawing of a leg, in cowboy boot I think, being pulled by two arms.

This kind of learning contributed to or confirmed my sense of the world being a place that I had to dope out, and that I didn't want to expose my innermost secrets to, since the world obviously thought I was different from what I was -- more American, more Christian, more like kids on TV. It contributed to and confirmed my general secretiveness.

posted by william 1:45 PM
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