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, November 05, 2003

I remember the Hathaway man with his beautifully pressed shirts and his eye-patch. That was the first eye-patch I saw that didn't belong to a pirate. I was confused. Was he a pirate? Or in disguise? I thought eye-patches were only pirate accesories. But now they seemed to mean -- well what? Had he lost an eye? It seemed unlikely, since he was so well put together. Was it just a fashion statement? Well, yes, but somehow it wasn't supposed to be only that. I never quite got it. I remember though at about the same time that some Peanuts character had to wear an eye-patch because she had lazy-eye, and this would force her bad eye to work. The concept of lazy-eye was interesting to me.

posted by william 10:18 PM
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