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, May 09, 2006

I remember that the first time I saw a real wheelbarrow was in Stormville, at the Hering's house. Barbara is a maniacal gardener (a category I didn't know until then). I'd seen wheelbarrows in cartoons, but hadn't realized they only had one wheel. (I think I hadn't actually counted how many wheels they had till just now. Which shows you can count to 1, contrary to some basic theories of mathematical knowledge.) To see a real wheelbarrow was like seeing a real version of a cartoon animal for the first time -- a real lion or giraffe or ostrich. I noticed they were far less stable than I'd thought (like my training wheels), and that they required more skill to use than I'd imagined. They were also bigger than I'd realized. I was surprised that they were used for dirt. I was surprised that there were more than one of them, since I'd somehow only seen them as single, Platonic forms in cartoons. (One was older than the other, and I got to prefer first the newer one and then the slightly larger, friendlier-seeming older of the two, with its smoothed down wooden handles.) These wheelbarrows seemed to know more about the world than I did -- after all they'd already known all about wheelbarrows.

posted by william 11:24 PM
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