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

Tuesday, April 15, 2008

I remember that I hurt my leg a little once -- I think I banged it into a piece of furniture. Hugh had injured his leg or his knee (he had fragile knees we'd find out later) and was limping, and then I hurt my leg and started limping too. At dinner I was limping my way to the kitchen to get something or clear something, and my father told me to stop. So I did stop -- in fact I wasn't in any pain at all, whatever had happened was over -- I stopped or thought I did, but he got angry and told me to stop immediately. I tried to walk normally but he got angrier and angrier, and I didn't know what to do. The next day everything was fine though, but it was odd to feel that I just didn't remember how to walk, or maybe just couldn't even walk gracefully under pressure (like the boy in Kleist's story who notices his unselfconscious resemblance to the Spinario sculpture in a mirror, and then can never repeat the gesture that brought out the resemblance.)

posted by william 12:52 PM
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