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, October 17, 2007

I remember, for the first time in decades, commendations! We got them in first and second grade. (Mrs. Comiskey, our second grade teacher, had a name that I thought was related to commendations.) They were obviously important, but they were purely abstract. They weren't stars or anything. They were just something you got for being good, as though stored up in some scholastic abstract treasury. But we thought they were important. I think this was my first introduction to abstraction. It was fascinating without my quite knowing that I was fascinated. (Fascination was an abstraction as well, so commendation led to the whole ramifying set of abstraction.)

posted by william 7:10 PM
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