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

Thursday, April 25, 2002

I remember "Spry for Baking," a large sign you could see from my room across the river in New Jersey. I liked the name -- the hint or slight resonance that Spry was... spry. I don't know what kind of product Spry was (or made), but I guess there was something comforting or reassuringly domestic about what it offered over that grand sweep of water among all those bright signs and machinery and docks on the Jersey side of the river. I remember an Alcoa sign there too, and then a little later learning that Alcoa stood for The Aluminum Company of America, right around the time that I learned that tin foil was really aluminum foil. And I remember occasional fires -- bright chemical conflagrations burning at night and sometimes into the next morning over the river: they were beatiful and scary (I remember hearing about a firefighter dying in one of them), but seemed a world away, part of the odd industrial spectacle of New Jersey from the comforting familiarity of the West Side. But still, New Jersey knew how to acknowledge such comforts -- there was, after all, Spry for Baking.

posted by william 2:03 PM
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