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, March 18, 2002

I remember a German steam engine I got. Its fuel was little white oblongs -- like parfarrin sugar cubes, but I don't know what they were made of. Steam built up in a little pressure chamber, with a safety valve that didn't whistle (to my intense disappointment) and it pushed a piston which turned a train wheel. (I remember noticing the external pistons on train wheels on a trip I went on with my mother and her mother.) The wheel didn't move. The whole thing was made of beautiful brass, some painted bright red, some a natural yellow.

I remember my Swiss Army Knife. I left it on my bureau and when a friend came over I went to show it to him, but it was gone. We looked all over. For years I thought it would show up, when we moved or threw stuff out, or otherwise turned the place over. But it never did, and I now think that friend must have pocketed it. But this hypothesis only came to me very recently.

I remember a ping-pong table taking up almost all my room. Also a pool table that my father got me for my birthday, but that I was disappointed by because it wasn't regulation size. He got it at Rappaport's on the East Side, and when we went to pick it up it wasn't ready and he had a fit at the guy who worked there. I was intensely embarrassed, as I always was when he reproved strangers. Eventually we got the pool table, and eventually it was fun, despite being too small. I liked the chalk. We fenced with the pool cues a lot too.

posted by william 8:03 PM
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