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, December 30, 2009

I remember that one day when we were just hanging around, maybe at my uptown grandmother's house, maybe at ours -- at a side- or cocktail-table, at any rate, where he used to sometimes do hand-puppet shows for me -- my father idly spun a coin, a nickel I think, flicking it with his thumb nail, and it whirled around like a top slowly drifting around the surface of the table. This was beautiful, and an amazing skill, one which I'd never dreamed existed.

posted by William 6:31 PM
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