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

Tuesday, April 18, 2006

I remember the Sterns had to "sell" their Windham house for Passover. They sold it and later bought it back for a dollar. Geoffrey explained that they were purging the chometz, and of course it was obvious to me that they weren't really selling the house. But I did somehow imagine that they were selling the chometz -- boxes of flour and mixes I imagined crowding their kitchen shelves -- and that somehow this all belonged to the guy they were selling it to, with the house more like a conveyance, moving not through time but through exchange (like that giant rock used as immobile money on a South Sea island), from the Sterns to their friend and back again, delivering the chometz to him. What would he do with all this chometz in an empty kitchen? Well, he was as notional, to me, as the imaginary chometz was, so it all made sense.

posted by william 10:13 PM
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