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 22, 2002

I remember a nuclear fall-out warning commercial from my childhood. A man in a suit, holding his jacket over his shoulder, walks through the empty streets of a city, wondering where everyone is. You hear the wailing horn of the attack siren, but he doesn't know what it means. The announcer speaks with contemptuous regret of his ignorance. He doesn't have a clue, as the siren keeps wailing. The siren was exactly the noon siren that used to go off in New York and which we all set out watches by. So I didn't see what he was doing wrong, though it did seem odd that there was no one out and about at noon (which the siren indicated was what time it was).

posted by william 4:53 PM
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