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, February 02, 2003

I remember, in the wake of the Columbia explosion, the deaths of White and Grissom by fire in a NASA mock-up. We'd only recently learned about pure oxygen and how it was easier to breathe that our mainly nitrogen air, and then they died because they were in a pure oxygen environment. To me it seemed ridiculous that they could die on the ground, so close to other people and to aid. But they did. I remember also the Russain cosmonauts who were found dead after splashdown. They went out of radio contact in the normal fashion of those times, and the next time they were seen they were dead. I found it odd that there was no record of the moment they died: all that vigilance, but all it tells is that at one moment they are alive and at another dead.

posted by william 12:36 AM
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