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, May 25, 2002

I remember The Time Tunnel. I remember on episode where the shorter star met his boyhood self on Hawaii on the day of Pearl Harbor. He couldn't tell anyone about it, but I think he managed to save his family. So like in the Terminator later (but not T2), it turned out that the intereference with the past far from leading to paradox was always part of the structure of the event (he survived because of his own interference, etc.) I liked these paradoxes of time travel, which Isaac Asimov also talked about, and which Jack Finney's Time and Againis great on. There was also The Time Machine which I don't think brings up the paradox, and the Tay Bradbury (I think) story called "A sound like thunder," about a time travelling safari company that allows you to go back in time and hunt dinosaurs, but only those they know are about to die violently anyhow, so that you won't cause any changes. In the story, one of the time-travellers panics, and steps on a butterfly, and when they return to the present, the whole biological history of the world has changed. The sound like thunder is the sound of his angry guide shooting him. Later I wondered whether this story wasn't the real origin of the term "The butterfly effect." And I remember another Time Tunnel where they manage to get back to the present but it's frozen in time. They leave a note. I thought that was an amazing episode. It may be the source of Nicholson Baker's wonderful book The Fermata. In The Time Tunnel the intrepid time travelers go running down a spiraling barber pole like tunnel with a perspective on a vanishing point. I always wondered how far the tunnel actually went, in the underground lab where it was built.

posted by william 6:51 AM
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