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

Monday, January 06, 2003

I remember my uptown grandparents taking me to the marionette theater in New York to see life-size marionettes perform The magic flute. From where I sat, they looked human, but through binoculars you could see they were marionettes. I thought this was interesting for about five minutes; then I got terribly bored again. But it was an adult experience. Later when I read Kleist I knew what he was talking about.
.

posted by william 12:32 AM
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