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

Saturday, September 20, 2003

I remember that rayguns shot disintegrating beams. I knew that disintegration meant you were reduced to nothing, or to particles, or to a vacuum. (May one say "a vacuum" or only "the vacuum?" It seems to me that recently people have been saying the, just as you're supposed to say "the empty set.") It was years later before I knew what integration meant. I never put "disintegrate" together with racial integration (whose antonym was "segregation"), nor with mathematical integers (vs. fractions) or mathematical integration (vs. differentiation); I think it was only when I learned the word integral that I realized that this is what rayguns destroyed. I remember "Ronald REAGen -- *ZAP*" from Woodstock, and how glad we all were that he was a has-been. And then who should propose Star Wars and rayguns?

posted by william 7:26 AM
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