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

Monday, February 21, 2011

I remember "Yes, I remember Adlestrop", and thinking of the poem on train journeys when we stopped at empty, rural stations. I think I read it in a poetry craft book, where the exercise was creative translation or rewriting or something. I misremembered it as being by Ted Hughes, until I saw it again today.

And now it makes me think of the British Library, because so much of the poetry I read was from there, and was like that, all meadowsweet and haycocks and Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire. Yet, it never felt too foreign, because I grew up with books that were very English from the time I started reading, and all those words were still a familiar (and beloved, because reading was beloved) part of my experience of the world, even if the objects they referred to were not.

posted by sravana 1:41 AM
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