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, May 06, 2003

I remember that I first saw a styrofoam cup at a Happening we went to in Central Park. I seem to recall we were impaling balls on sticks for some reason. And there was water in styrofoam cups. Or we might have been impaling the cups. At any rate I was amazed -- in a low key way -- by styrofoam. It was so light. And then it turned out it could hold hot liquids too. It seemed part of the inexhaustible array of things the future was offering. Like the Happening itself -- an example of strange and surprising adult activities (there were lots of kids there, but it just wasn't part of what kids did) that nothing in childhood would lead you to predict about adulthood. How deceptive both were.

posted by william 6:42 AM
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