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

Wednesday, June 11, 2003

I remember a pre-energy crisis ad from Con Ed (Consolidated Edison). Light would scare away intruders. Lots of grim black and white. A faceless would-be criminal comes into the light and goes scurrying back into the darkness. End of ad: announcer, in great calm James Earl Jones like voice, intones: "For less than two cents a night: to stop a thief, light a light." I couldn't figure out whether that was supposed to rhyme or not. I recognized as intentional the great rhythm of the last seven words, but I couldn't tell (as I would now put it) whether it was prose rhythm or poetic meter. The first part of the sentence was so unrhythmical. When did it draw itself up into its full rhetorical dignity? With the words a night? Or only in the last seven words? This was a question that had a kind of low-grade presence for me, just as the sentence itself did. (Later these kinds of questions would blossom into a period when I would obsessively try to explain to myself the subtlest effects that commercials produced.) Now of course I see that the rhyme was certainly intentional. But what was most effective about it was that you didn't know, and so kept worrying the sentence. Not that I had control of the lights in our house anyway.

posted by william 7:19 AM
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