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, September 23, 2003

I remember laundry hanging out to dry on lines strung between buildings. This was a very common sight, and I remember it particularly in a courtyard neighboring my grandmother's building uptown, but also pretty generally. It's still a common sight, but only in movies, photos, and paintings. It's been a very long time since I've seen it in reality. The drying laundry disappeared imperceptibly in the last few decades, and no one noticed its absence. I used to wonder how people rigged the lines up. How did you make contact with the person at the other window in the other building? I liked the pulley system that moved the laundry out and back, a system which solved one of my other puzzles: how the laundry got so far out over the void. I remember lines of laundry criss-crossing each other. All the laundry that I remember hanging on those lines is white. Where did people dry colored clothes?

posted by william 11:55 PM
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