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

Saturday, February 18, 2006

I remember that our piano had three pedals, and that the middle one wasn't official; you could push it down and then slide it left so that it would stay down. It brought a layer of felt between the hammers and the strings, so that the sounds were deeply muted. This was so you could practice in an apartment and not annoy the neighbors. I hated what it did to the sound, though I couldn't have said why. I didn't worry about the neighbors, because we could never hear them (except for the kid who used to run around the apartment above us, making the chandelier shake and jangle -- one of the few sounds to drive my crazy, or maybe it was waiting for him to make his next circuit, and hoping that he was finally done).

Because of the neighbors my mother wouldn't let me practice after 9:00, so if I could string the evening along until 9 or so I wouldn't have to practice. Every minute I temporized after 8:30 was one minute subtracted from the half hour I was supposed to do.

posted by william 12:35 AM
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