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, April 13, 2002

From Thomas Carl Wall:

I remember owning a Rube Waddell baseball card. Waddell was the slightly insane pitcher for Connie Mack's Philadelphia Athletics who would run right off the mound and chase fire trucks. I remember the photo was slightly out of focus, Waddell was leaning foreward as if he had just delivered a pitch, and he was smiling. I could see how his fingers had gripped the ball. His smile was disconcerting because he faced the camera but looking off to his left. The card disappeared from my collection sometime between 1962 and 1996, a period in my life when I never looked at baseball cards. I've never seen the card again in other collections or in catalogues. So part of me is not sure I ever really owned the card (or if it existed at all) even though I can still remember holding it in my hand and studying it.

Thomas Carl Wall

posted by william 10:36 PM
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