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, October 01, 2002

I remember my globe. It stood up at waist height and spun under the metal latitude markers. It had a metal time-change indicator over the North Pole, and the South Pole was too close to the swivel, but otherwise it was fascinating. I puzzled over the ocean currents it marked: I didn't understand how currents could go thousands of miles in the empty ocean. I still don't. I also puzzled over the sizes of very small things. Could the currents really be as wide as the not-quite-one-dimensional line that indicated was? One day the globe got dented -- I think I was wrestling with a friend and we kicked it or knocked into it -- and I was deeply surprised to find that it was made of gray cardboard. It dented along a major latitutde/longitude intersection, since they were scored in the cardboard. That dent and the cardboard underneath always seemed like a rebuke to me afterwards, but I could never think of what: of the world? of my interest in the world? of the idea of representing the world in a little globe? Of the knowledge that I could know things -- see through things? -- a knowledge that I didn't want to have? Did my parents give me the globe? I think so. Was I too aware that it would be possible to see through their authority as well? I hope not.

posted by william 2:10 PM
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