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

Tuesday, August 09, 2011

I remember Tisha b'Av: I remember sitting on the floor of the Dunbar Street building, leaning on my mother, listening to Eikha, words lit by candles wrapped in tin foil. I remember sitting on the ground in front of the Kotel on the trip my brother and I took alone. I was 14. I remember sitting there into the evening, and as darkness fell I finally felt the full front of loss and grief, and wept, and a tanned old woman in a dress like a housecoat came over and told me to get up, get up, there was a time to cry, but now it was time to break the fast.

posted by Rosasharn 9:01 AM
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