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

Wednesday, June 13, 2007

I remember that the dock in Bellagio was painted dark green -- is this called olive green? -- and that the raft was also green with lots of peeling paint. I remember this, suddenly, vividly, and from great depths because I remember that I was surprised by the docks on Long Island, a few years later. They weren't painted, and I was surprised that the wood itself had the quality of peeling paint -- rough, splintery, unpredictable. This must have be due to the salt water there, but I didn't expect it: I thought of wood as being like the wood of our floors or the table or our school desks or even the picnic tables at Bear Mountain or in Stormville -- smooth and pliable, with a lot of give. The benches in Riverside Park could give you splinters, I guess, but that also felt like an effect of peeling paint, as though the paint were pulling bits of wood off with it when it came off. On Long Island though it was the wood itself, and this was a surprising discovery, the disconnect between what the docks looked like from afar and the actual experience you had of them when you walked on them. The people who knew them -- Michael C's father especially -- who owned boats and walked barefoot on them with their fishing tackle had a kind of expertise which made them unsurprised by the roughness of the wood, and which made the roughness of the wood the signal of that expertise, so that that wood took on a prestige for me different from the pointlessly well-painted but now peeling dock in Bellagio.

posted by william 4:35 PM
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