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 16, 2006

I remember a summer morning eating Rice Crispies for breakfast at the little wooden table by the wall in our kitchen on Locke Street. I couldn't have been more than 6 years old, since we moved before second grade started. Somehow I realized (read it? mom read it to me?) that there was a competition in which children were drawing and submitting their pictures of the Rice Crispies box, and I decided to enter. I drew the box--Snap, Crackle, Pop, smiling around a big bowl of cereal--with colored pencils. Sitting still and doing this, out of the blue, on a whim, and working from start to finish without interruption felt luxurious. Summer meant that my mother didn't insist I had to go anywhere or do anything; on the contrary, she lent me her fancy pencils to color with. I remember feeling proud of my work. There was a surprisingly fair resemblance between what I had made and the image on the box. I knew that older kids would probably send in better pictures, but I wrote my name and age on my picture and felt that for myself, it was a good job. I must have finished at least kindergarden, for I remember addressing the envelope myself. When, sometime later, I received bike reflectors and decals with Kellogg's characters on them in the mail, I felt delighted that my picture had won the contest.

posted by Rosasharn 7:48 PM
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