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

Tuesday, July 23, 2002

I remember Morse Code. Either my mother or my oddly named friend Comrade (though I think now maybe his name was really Conrad), who frequently used the word Whatchamacallit, told me that SOS was dash dash dash dot dot dot dash dash dash. I think Comrade might have told me what it was correctly, and when I told my mother about this and tried to remember the sequence she reversed it as above. (Since it's in fact ...---...) I remember that she told me that SOS wasn't Save Our Ship, as I thought it was, but Save Our Souls. I remember being disappointed when I heard that the U.S. emergency call was "Mayday." I remember that maydayis really "m'aidez," bad French for "aidez-moi."

posted by william 11:56 PM
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