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, August 05, 2003

I remember police phone boxes, generally next to fire alarms, on lampposts. They were battleship grey or green, and cops on the beat would call and check in from them, or use them whenever they needed to communicate with headquarters. They were part of the cityscape at the level of adult heads. I never quite knew why they existed -- like the other mail boxes, the olive ones that stood (and stand) near the regular red white and blue ones (just white and blue now). They belonged to a world of vocation and expertise that was parallel to ours, and somehow made it possible.

posted by william 7:28 AM
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