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

Friday, January 19, 2007

I remember stripping the wallpaper off the dining room. The wallpaper in my parents house was old, and dingy, and had been painted over with paint that was, by that time, old and dingy. For some reason, possibly because we felt so poor, or possibly due to some aesthetic about doing things the old fashioned way, or possibly because nobody thought it through, we used water, spackle knives and kitchen sponges for the job--and not even hot water. It took days and days of hard work. My arms were sore, my neck was sore. When we got them clean, the walls themselves were strangely beautiful. Unevenly hued, warm toned, much golder than we'd expected. My mother said she would like to keep the dining room empty and the plaster bare, but, of course, as soon as the walls had dried, we spackled, primed, and painted.

posted by Rosasharn 10:36 AM
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