I remember / je me souviens
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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 16, 2006
I remember fingerpainting with my mother. This was a big deal, so we must not have done it all the time. She put down newspapers on the kitchen table, and then she rolled out a long strip of thin off-white paper and got several jars of gloopy paint out of a box (but I have the feeling there weren't all the colors--I'm remembering green and blue and black, no red), and we proceeded to make a mess. I remember feeling surprised that one could do this at home.


posted by Rosasharn 7:43 PM
. . .
0 comments
Comments:

Post a Comment





. . .