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

Sunday, August 04, 2002

I remember that when you got off an airplane on to the tarmac there was something odd and the reverse of evocative when you came to a place that was hot. The plane was so much about being radically inside, since outside was cold and death (I remember when I went sky-diving the first time the vividness of realizing that nothing was holding the plane up, and that there was therefore no reason to clutch the plane; the second time I no longer felt this way) that it was very strange to exit and find that there was no difference between inside and outside, or that outside was heated more than the inside was. I'd have this feeling particularly when we came back from Italy, since usually it would be a muggy August night, and New York was so much hotter than Zurich (whence we usually returned) and you would go from a heated interior to an even warmer exterior. Then when I finally went back to my bed, my mattress felt very hard compared to the beds I'd been sleeping on for the past few weeks. And the sound of the busses through the open window was very loud. Later I remembered some of this negative evocativeness when I went to Florida one March. I lit a cigarette as soon as I got off the plane, and the smoke which had been so noticeably hot in the cold of a New York winter now was hardly distinguishable from the air I was breathing. The cigarette was almost entirely unsatisfying -- not the nicotine but the smoke itself. It was a little like smoking blindfold: I had no sense of the pleasure I usually got from difference between normal breath and smoke.

posted by william 7:04 AM
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