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

Saturday, November 13, 2010

I remember when my parents first showed me a rowboat, on Lake Carmel, near Stormville. I was surprised that a boat without a motor could float. They explained that what kept it up was the fact that it was scooped out, that it had air in it. (My mother told me that wood floated anyhow, but I think that was on a different occasion.) This seemed very mysterious to me. How did the lake know that above the floor of the boat there was air, that it wasn't a solid?

This was another of the mysteries of Stormville and of the lake somehow kept from seeping away by springs. The lake itself had that eerie authority of entities that are alive and that know how to be in the world and to interact with it, and how to use interesting items like the springs to be found in my toys.

posted by William 8:29 AM
. . . 1 comments
Comments:
I used to make paperboats to play with in rain puddles for a long time before I saw a real boat, so that question never occurred to me. But I remember that when I first saw a motorboat (which was after I had seen rowboats), the motor seemed out-of-place and inelegant.

# posted by sravana : 10:58 AM

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