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

Thursday, February 07, 2013

I remember that when I had to clear the table -- a twice-nightly chore I despised, since my father just sat there, waiting for the magical transformation of surface, first for the fruit, which he wouldn't eat if there were any relics of the main meal still there, then for the end of the evening -- I would always feel still more oppressed when my mother made me get a tray from the kitchen to stack the plates and bowls on. I knew it was more efficient to take everything out on a tray, but I was too lazy to want to be efficient. Getting the tray added a different kind of step to the whole process. Instead of just mindlessly bringing in plate and glass and crumpled napkin as they came into my reach, I had to think about the thing, put it all together, come up with an algorithm that compressed the dirty dishes efficiently on the tray. And the best way for me to both cherish and distract myself from my resentment at this chore (abraüm!, my father kept demanding) was to go off into my own world as I brought things haphazardly into the kitchen, that haphazardness a kind of protest, I think I now see, to the tyrannical orderliness my father insisted on.

posted by William 5:49 PM
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