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, April 02, 2007

I remember the Sterns scrubbing their house of hometz (?) one April. Geoffrey told me that his father had sold their house in Windham for Passover for a dollar to a neighbor, and then would buy it back after Passover. I liked the idea of the actual dollar that would buy and sell the house. For some reason the dollar he sold it for seemed more real to me than the dollar he would buy it back with -- there was a certain relaxed ease with which the dollar represented the legal fiction. I'd heard before (I think) of things being bought and sold for a dollar for legal purposes. But here the dollar was making possible a religious duty that preceded the U.S. by centuries, and yet it was doing it with nonchalant grace. I had a visual image of its pale green harmonizing with the slightly bluer greenish tint of their kitchen.

posted by william 10:26 PM
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