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, May 14, 2006

I remember that after swimming I would get in the shower sometimes and dropping my cold swimsuit to the concrete floor I would use my toes to pull it off from around my feet, feeling the grit that had got into the suit against its fabric. It was a struggle, sometimes, to hook my big toe around the band and somehow get it off from where it was clinging around my other ankle -- and them sometimes I'd get my toe entangled in it when I succeeded. But it was worth it not to bend down and out of the warm water cascading down, worth it to avoid the goose-pimples (as my mother called them) just the other side of the stream of water.

I also remember getting in the warm tub with my bathing suit on (much harder to pull it off with my toes than in the shower) and the kind of substantial belch of cold water that would billow out of my suit, reminding me again how warm the water I was bathing in was.

posted by william 9:46 AM
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