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

Wednesday, May 06, 2015

I remember my uptown grandmother bouncing me on her lap to the song "Hoppe, hoppe, Reiter". Her delight was greater than mine, and this was one of the few times when her delight didn't delight me too. Later she did it to my sister, and I didn't particular enjoy that either, though I liked learning what the words meant. The version she sang wasn't about how the crows would eat him ("fressen ihn die Raben"), but about how the boys would help him ("helfen ihn die knaben"), so that there was hope! On the other hand, I think that if he fell into the mud he was going to drown.

posted by William 8:50 AM
. . . 0 comments

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