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

Friday, April 04, 2008

I remember my mother telling me -- we were looking at a rowboat or maybe getting into it on Lake Carmel, near Stormville -- that things would float if they had air in them. This was a fascinating piece of knowledge -- I loved the fact that she knew it; but, but then she knew everything; and I loved the fact that it was true. (Later she would tell me about Archimedes's "Eureka" and how objects displace their own weight -- floating objects, but I don't think she quite knew that; she also told me about Pi but thought Pi really was 22/7).

I also remember her telling me, at the dining room table, how "water always seeks its own level," a wonderful and lucid precept that had for me the force of revelation. What was revelatory about it was the combination of description and fact. It was something I knew intuitively, but not that strictly or perfectly. And now I did. But I was also awed by the clarity of the formulation. It was possible to say these things perfectly! My mother and water were two similar and perfect intelligences -- why, it turned out that water could seek, had intention and agency, just like my mother -- each of them in absolute tune with the other, which is to say, with how things are.

posted by william 10:22 AM
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