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 the only time that my father hit me. I was being dressed by our old time maid while he was watching (my mother was absent learning a craft in Paris; I might have been five or six). While being dressed I was deliberately uncooperative and obstructive, squirming and making it difficult for her. My father, a man of liberal views and a highly developed sense of justice, particularly where people in a subservient position were involved, could not stand the sight of the maid struggling. Enraged, he hit my arm, which as it happened swelled up to some extent. After the initial shock, I didn't consider the incident a big deal, but he was haunted by it, by his own rage and force, and he never hit me again. He also never forgot it.

posted by alma 10:16 AM
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