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

Wednesday, July 10, 2002

I remember the stoppers that my grandparents, and sometimes my parents, used to seal opened soda bottles. You opened the bottles with a bottle-opener (no screw tops then: the soda industry didn't want you to be able to conserve its product), and couldn't close them again, so you used these strange little devices that I found quite ugly. They were rubber coated metal corks, with a plunger for your thumb on top and two curved finger loops for your fingers on the side, attached to the plunger with a kind of spring action. By depressing the plunger you lengthened the rubber-coated metal cylinder (I think it was probably two cylinders, one telescoping into the other), which made it slender enough to fit into the mouth of the bottle. It would sort of taper down to a point where the metal pulled the rubber thin, but you could see the seams where the two cylinders met -- I guess the inner one could have been a spiral spring of metal tape, since it seemed to taper more than the outer one -- so it always looked as though its mechanical guts were about to spill. When you let go, the cylinder thickened, and the two finger-loops clamped themselves onto the protruding lip of the bottle, sealing it tightly. I seem to recall how the rubber would go bad, and also that there were two sizes for these bottle-stoppers, like the two sizes of pencil that were available then. Only now does the obvious sexual meaning of my dislike of these stoppers occur to me -- their metallic inelegance, what with those loops, and the strange reversal of normal satisfactions because to lengthen was to loosen and to get a satisfying seal was to relax the tension you'd put on the stopper and to let the thing get stubby and short.

posted by william 7:05 AM
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