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, September 03, 2007

I remember how interesting I found the toothmarks I could make in my arm. I remember that the palm-down-side of my forearm (no doubt there's a technical name for this) took the best impressions -- no hair there -- but that it was somehow more interesting to press my teeth into the top of my forearm (so my tongue experienced the texture of my hair), even though I could really only get my upper teeth there. None of this was destructive or self-mutilating: it never hurt. It was just an exploration of what I was physically made of, and what was interesting was the fact that I could take impressions like wax, and then as with wax or sand they would disappear. The same was true with scratching a rough rock on my thigh, not too hard. I liked the rough white tracks it left, and how I couldn't tell if they were rock or epidermis, and the fact that you could write or draw with them (which of course you couldn't with your teeth, though I'd sometimes try to leave interesting tooth patterns, as though of a nonhuman creature with many sets of teeth).

posted by william 8:00 AM
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