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, January 15, 2007

I remember the raindrops on the car windows of my uptown grandfather's car. They were smaller than the drops on our windows, pearled and compressed and beaded by the texture and angle of the glass and by the wind as the car moved. They formed tracks, tailing into smaller drops towards the front of the car, as the draft pushed them backwards, where the smaller drops would merge into larger ones. I liked those patterns, especially in the late afternoon, when they would sometimes get the blue of the car's paint, sometimes the red of the red lights we'd pass perpendicularly as we drove up Riverside Drive. They looked nothing at all like rain on the windows of my room. That was the only car I rode in regularly, so I associate that pattern of rain with my grandfather -- as though the rain and the car knew each other and knew him, all part of the same world which knew who was who and what was going on.

posted by william 12:20 AM
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