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, March 12, 2006

I remember slamming the car door on my father's fingers once. He had his hand on the molding of the rear right passenger door, as were unloading the car, but I noticed an instant too late. The door slammed shut enough to latch. His pain was obvious and unimaginable, and his face contorted. I thought he'd get angrier than I'd ever seen him, since the sudden gratutious pain was a scarier version of all the things that blew up and made him angry at me, all the sudden disasters that so terrified me. And this was more terrifying than any of those, since I just didn't understand what would happen when fingers and chrome took up space large enough for only one or the other. I was terrified, for him, not for myself, but still his anger would be part of the general atmosphere of terror. But he was fine about it: he jumped around for a while and put ice on his fingers, but amazingly he didn't hold it against me, or the world, at all.

posted by william 5:24 PM
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