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, May 23, 2002

I remember being fascinated by hierarchies. Actually, I think Hugh Cramer was more fascinated than I was, but he was always interesting on the subject. So I remember discussions we had when I slept over and we lay on the bunk beds in the dark about the relative destructiveness of atom bombs, hydrogen bombs and what he informed was the cobalt bomb which could destroy half the world. And then there were white belts, yellow belts, green belts, brown belts, black belts in their various degrees, and then the one or two people with black-belt degrees so high that they were awarded honrary red belts. And Hugh also was very good at catching pigeons and keeping them in boxes in the courtyard behind his building. He explained the extremely complicated pecking order, which seemed to contain teegers (?), white teegers, homers, king homers, king white homers, bald king white homers, after which was only the division of eagles. Hugh was trying to catch a bald king white homer, but as with red belts (and 1943 copper pennies) there were only a couple in circulation. Pigeons were supposed to follow unquestioningly any superior bird. I believed Hugh implicitly. I do remember the varieties of pigeons, and in particular the light tan variety which I don't think you see much any more. These were the same color as the swirling sand at the ocean's edge which I used to contemplate (see an earlier entry) standing in front of my grandfather.

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