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, June 15, 2003

I remember all the rubber stamps my parents had -- stamps with their home address, office address, date, various legal terms, forms to fill in, and what-not. There just seemed to be too many of them, like my father's overabundant set of keys. My parents kept them in the top desk drawer, in a cardboard box-top, along with the stapler. I remember that the stapler and the ink-pad were both forbidden to my childish touch -- the stapler because I could staple myself, the ink-pad because I could get ink over everything. I remember liking to see how many times I could stamp something before I needed to ink it again. I remember black ink, and double ink pads, half red, half blue. I remember the smell of the ink, and that it dried out if you left it open. I remember how hard it is to center the stamp where you want it. I remember that the stamp's copy was printed on the side of the mallet part of the stamp. I remember also reading the rubber backwards when looking at their bottoms. I remember how hard it was to change the date on the date-stamp: the little notched wheels that you had to turn, and that hurt your finger tips and got ink on them. Nothing worse than going too far and then having to turn it back. Sometimes they turned easily, but then they wouldn't settle right and catch, so the date might not come out legibly.

posted by william 1:09 AM
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