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

Thursday, October 11, 2007

I remember Hurricane Gloria. I remember staying home from school and the excitement of waiting for something incredible--something hard to believe: Would or could this imaginary adult storm knock down the stand of creaking old oaks just south of the house? If they fell, would they crash down on us--how could they not? I remember my mother filling huge five gallon glass jars full of water, and possibly the bathtub, and jittery trips up and down stairs to the basement; did we really have to stay down there? We couldn't. I don't remember losing power, though I do remember big quiet calm, so probably we did. I remember standing in the kitchen, looking out the window into the woods, watching a huge black chestnut tree go down. It fell as if in slow motion, gently, swishing across my field of vision from left to right, and never made a sound until it thumped to the ground and the house shook a little. Feeling it fall amazed me, how invisibly the wind tore it up, singled it out among all the trees in the forest, but more than that, I gaped at the roots that had ripped out of the ground, 15 or 20 feet into the air, pulled up by the weight of their own tree. Whenever I tried to explain what I had seen, I had to use two hands: My left arm up, fingers splayed as the tree's canopy, my right hand below the left elbow, fingers spread for roots, rising as the left arm folded. We had no swing set or jungle gym, and for the next few years, until my parents finally got someone to come and chainsaw those long branches, my brother and I played on that great, horizontal tree.

posted by Rosasharn 12:35 PM
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