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, July 10, 2012

I remember pencil boxes with the little keyboards on top, and their tinny electronic sounds. They came with small booklets of nursery rhyme scores. I remember discovering the mapping between Carnatic and Western notes while playing around with one, and being surprised, but not very, that there seemed to be a one-to-one correspondence (and verified it as a fact later, but with whom?). I played Vara Veena on it obsessively for a few days.

I remember hearing and remembering Carnatic songs as sequences of syllables, one for each careful note (or three), and not putting the syllables together into words. Possibly because that's how they were written down, or because so many of the words were names of gods and their epithets -- entire verses of only epithets, so removed from normal language anyway.

posted by sravana 3:19 AM
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