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, October 28, 2003

I remember -- another useful fact learned from comic books -- that if you die in a dream, you die. And I noticed that I did always wake up before I died in disaster dreams and nightmares. I think I learned this from a Batman comic. The bad guy somehow gets people to dream that they die, and then their hearts stop beating. I don't remember how he does this. It never occured to me that the writers of the comics couldn't possibly know this as a fact.

posted by william 9:42 PM
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