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, 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
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