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

Sunday, April 22, 2007

I remember wondering what was underneath my nails, or rather having a vague sense of hollowness there. At different times I had different ideas. I had a vague thought that the hollowness was just the standard hollowness of the inside of my body, with my nails being less obviously airtight then the rest of my integuement; and then again I also thought my nails belonged to a kind of Lego assemblage. They were the part of me that seemed manufactured, made of plastic. So I associated them with things that snapped into place, and I thought there was a kind of corresponding plastic-like structure beneath them, the structure of the inside of my fingertips.

posted by william 5:49 PM
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