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

Wednesday, October 29, 2003

I remember, from cop shows (Dick Tracy too?), the Miranda warning (which must have been brand new, and which I didn't know by name at the time): "Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law." I never understood why it positively would be used against the accused. How could you use the truth against an innocent person? How could you use a denial of guilt against the denier? Somehow it seemed the police had ways of making what you said proof of your guilt: as though they had control of meanings, or of the consequences of meanings no matter what the meaning of what was said. I was curious to see such a protestation used against the accused in a court of law -- it promised to be very interesting -- but it never was.

posted by william 2:11 PM
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