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

Monday, February 11, 2002

I remember symmetrical windshield wipers: they both swept semi-circles, moving in opposite directions simultaneously, towards each other in the middle, then away to the edges. I hated when parallel wipers came in, unbalancing the window into a cubist form, with a high, nearly vertical angle on the left rotated to a near horizontal on the right.

I remember as well having a similar distaste for what I called I-books. I deplored the fact that Jack London's Sea-Wolf was in the first person, after White Fang and The Call of the Wild. The feeling was like that of the windshield wipers: there was something asymmetrical about the point of view. It felt masochistic to read them -- a combination of pleasure with disgust, where the pleasure was almost nothing, and the disgust barely tolerable. But somehow I changed my mind when Wolf Larsen had his stroke -- and I think now it's because it then became a he-book: he became opaque to the narrating I, and that must have made for a kind of symmetry at the end.

posted by william 3:14 PM
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