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

Sunday, October 19, 2003

I remember film strips. I remember the reels they came on, like the reels of the movies my father shot, but bigger. I remember not knowing if they were film strips or scripts or scrips. Somehow they all fit. I heard the word "scrip" at some Purim party, I think: we were given scrip to buy treats and toys. And since the scrip came in perforated sheets, it seemed not unlike the sproket-holed film, with the clicking sound that it made seeming the auditory coutnterpart to the perforations. The idea that these were scripts was also obvious, somehow: they were pre-determined in their meaning. And all of this would eventually...mesh with the idea of stripping gears, on projectors, and in cars. Somehow the words strip, script, and scrip felt attached to each other by their shared letters, and perforated in ways appropriate to all of them where they diverged. Perhaps I'm just registering a faint residual dislexia, since I still have trouble with the difference between specter and sceptre, also around those letters (s, p, c, r, and t), but still the connection seemed very real to me.

posted by william 11:20 PM
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