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, June 11, 2008

I remember that if a little foil from your baked potato touches your fillings, you get an unpleasant shock. Your mouth turns into a battery. (I remember this though you may not. It doesn't happen with the fillings they use now.) The effect was interesting: not that suddenly you realized that you were a machine with hardware in your mouth that could produce a circuit. Quite the reverse: there was dear little me, the "dear self," and then this alien effect in my mouth (seat of selfhood says William James), and a kind of recoil inwards even away from my teeth, from this current flowing through me but which was not me, just the buzz of the world. I could experience it, but it was not me. It was the world betraying me a little, betraying me even within my mouth, even in the food I ate. But it wasn't me, and the betrayal wasn't that bad either, and seemed to limit the world's viciousness and incursion to the extent only of a practical joke. The world: that constant joker that produced cartoons and pranks and aluminum foil in the potatoes, and so went a bit too far, but only a bit really: and never for very long. I thought it would never do anything really mean.

posted by william 4:56 PM
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