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, June 28, 2014

I remember noticing that when my (uptown) grandmother swept the floor, she accumulated the dirt into a pile before sweeping it all into the dust pan which she emptied into the garbage can. I think I had had a vague impression, from cartoons where you only saw creatures sweeping dirt under rugs (seemed fine to me), or maybe from the frames in Peanuts, that the proper use of dust pans was more or less equally magical, but a little more work, that they behaved like vacuum cleaners or carpet sweepers and made the dirt disappear. So it seemed somehow more magical still to see that sweeping was a skill, that it was human and not machine knowledge that got rid of the dust. Even if I had thought about having to empty the dust pan, I never would have thought to sweep all the dirt together first; I'd just have swept dirt into the dust pan every time I swung the broom.

posted by William 5:14 PM
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