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

Sunday, April 21, 2002

I remember the first movies I remember vividly: my mother taking me to El Cid (Charlton Heston, again); and my father taking me to Bad Day at Black Rock (Spencer Tracy). I guess they're both movies about victory through the prostheses that seem to signal defeat. El Cid won't let his friends remove the arrow that the next day will make him a legendary figure when his corpse, tied on his horse, scatters panic among the Moors. Tracy, one-armed, must remove his tie to somehow explode a bomb or prevent it from being exploded: the tie does what his missing arm can't. I also remember Chaplin movies my father took me to, especially City Lights, Modern Times, and (most vividly) Limelight. We laughed ourselves sick at the final scene, and when Chaplin falls off the stage we laughed even harder, until we realized that it was tragedy. I asked why they covered his face and my father said "Because he's very sick." Now I know better.

posted by william 7:47 AM
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