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

Thursday, March 15, 2012

I remember brushing my hair in a very slowly moving vehicle in Cairo. The traffic there was mythical, cars and trucks and buses rolling forward bumper to bumper. I remember watching men climb off buses while they were moving. People helped them get down. I don't remember what kind of vehicle we were in, only that I was sitting in a big window, and that I saw people on the roads watching me brush my hair, but I did not stop doing it. I guess it was a bus. We were certainly on a tour bus when we went to Giza and the Valley of the Kings. By a few days into the tour, I remember having seen a lot of tombs, a lot of mummies, and so feeling nonplussed by the ones with Roman faces--they were latecomers, anyway. I remember seeing so much gold, and so much turquoise, and so much alabaster, that that was what the world seemed made of. There were many things I hadn't known about days before that I now took for granted, could recognize without trying. I didn't care for scarabs. I did like the repeating imagery of lotus and papyrus. I remember that at some point in those five days, looking at the crazy-amazing tomb-paintings felt normal, just what one did. Now I can only recall the vision from one: a starry sky, possibly from Queen Nefertiti's tomb. I remember that Luxor was huge and sunny, and that we ran around in the Temple, and we were driven in an open horse-drawn carriage, an allusion, for me, to Pharaoh's drowned chariot.

posted by Rosasharn 11:41 PM
. . . 0 comments

Monday, March 05, 2012

I remember that my parents let me keep a salamander I caught in the woods. It was beautiful: coolly, smoothly tangerine all over, its belly slightly pale, and spotted black down its back. We brought it home in a jar filled with moist soil and leaves, and they bought me a turtle bowl to keep it in. I don't know what they fed it. It was tiny and delicate, its diamond-shaped head elegant. It lived with us for four or five months, and then it died: I found it stiff, dull, and desiccated in its bowl one morning, and at first I did not understand.

posted by Rosasharn 4:02 PM
. . . 0 comments

Saturday, March 03, 2012

I remember watching the Monkees. They lived at the top of a house, with outdoors wooden stairs. I remember the corny, camp fun of playing them on the juke-box at Chicken on the Run (the pizza place), a year or two before the corny, camp fun of playing "A Boy Named Sue" there.

posted by William 9:57 AM
. . . 0 comments

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