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, January 25, 2020

I remember that when I used to get up very early, at six or seven at six or seven (a.m., years old respectively) when I was staying at my uptown grandparents' house I would sometimes see lots of crumbs on the counter in the raking early morning sunlight that came through their eastward facing kitchen window. This clashed with my sense of my grandmother's tidiness, but merely as surprise. It wasn't that she was untidy, but that the sun was even more relentless in its exposures than she was in her evening kitchen-cleaning, or maybe that the dazzling early morning sun and the crumbs had a kind of relationship -- the stark, inhuman fact of being there -- that transcended anything you could think of as domestic and familiar.

Later, when my grandmother was bustling around in the kitchen, all had returned to the comfortable familiarity of the evening before.

posted by William 8:47 AM
. . . 0 comments

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