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, February 23, 2013

I remember indirectly that when I was two years old and alone at home with our maid, who like all our maids was a peasant woman recently arrived in the city (Sarajevo). I reached up to the stove, and spilled a pot of hot coffee all over my arm. The maid applied the peasant remedy: putting my arm under cold water. When my parents arrived, they had a fit, because the medical lore at the time (1934) required that the arm be treated with salves. As was recognized later, the maid's remedy was the right one, and my arm bears no scar whatever of the incident.

posted by alma 10:10 AM
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