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

Saturday, October 06, 2012

I remember losing teeth: the somewhat disconcerting onset of shaking, the delicious crackling moment when the tooth became dislodged from the jaw, the fun of playing with it, the rearrangement of pressure and tongue movement and taste for the few days before it gave way. I was uncharacteristically careful with the last tooth, hoping to delay its fall, and succeeding for a couple of months: much as I was in a hurry to grow up, that tooth was a countdown to some sort of finality I wasn't prepared for. It fell in the middle of an English class -- grammar, not literature, because I remember who was teaching it: we had an unusual arrangement in 9th grade of having two different teachers for English -- and I had to ask for permission to go throw it out.

posted by sravana 12:55 AM
. . . 2 comments
Comments:
How did you know it was your last tooth? I'm sure I didn't. I lost teeth, then stopped losing them (for a while, anyhow).

# posted by William : 9:58 AM

I hadn't lost any for over two years before this one started shaking, so it was a pretty good bet.

# posted by sravana : 2:48 PM

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