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 shrieking "yikes" on the playground in nursery school. Four of us played superheroes together (I was Batgirl, and Justin was Batman, but I couldn't tell you the names of the other two, though Supergirl was my best friend at school). This mostly meant we ran around and tried not to be trampled under the feet of the big kids, the kindergardeners. Yikes was to be shouted breathlessly and gleefully after any near miss. We thought it a grand word.


posted by Rosasharn 7:35 PM
. . .
0 comments
Comments:

Post a Comment





. . .