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, May 05, 2010

I remember the time we drove through a swarm of locusts. It was summer in Maine. We were all in the car. My father, driving, my mother, my brother. We were driving back from somewhere fun. I think it was probably 1987 or 1988. It was getting dark or already was dark but not dark dark. The hits on the windshield started one at a time, sort of like big fat rain drops, those first fat drops before the downpour. We were hitting either the stragglers or the vanguard. Then we hit a dense cluster of them and the windshield went blind within a minute. My father had to pull over. It was gross. It was not easy to clean that windshield.

posted by Grashupfer 9:04 PM
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