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

Monday, October 23, 2006

I remember being among the last three to finish the red workbook in first grade. I remember not caring about this; my teacher and others (parents? classmates?) wanted me to feel shame, hoped that this or something would motivate me to work faster or more consistently, but I didn't care. What would be the point of working faster? If you finished the red workbook, you had to do the blue one. Why rush to the next boring job?

I remember finding red dots on my stomach when I went to the bathroom one day, sometime in the spring. I showed my teacher, and I was sent home with Chickenpox. While I recovered, my father made me finish the red workbook and some horrible textbook from Hebrew class, too, where you had to copy the letters in script over and over again.

What I really wish I could remember is what I thought about, what I daydreamed, instead of working. This was before I began reading, before I sneaked books into classrooms to read under my desk. I wish I could recover the activity of my mind before I loved books. What was in there?

posted by Rosasharn 11:05 PM
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