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

Friday, November 28, 2003

I remember my father taking me to the Thanksgiving Day parade. We saw marchers dressed as Revolutionary War soldiers. At the time I didn't know the difference between parades with real soldiers, policemen, etc. and costumes. I liked the rifles or muskets the soldiers were carrying. I said something about the fact that they were carrying guns, but my father said they were "sticks" not guns. I found this confusing, because they didn't look like sticks. The had shoulder stocks and rifling and were uniform. This was troubling to me: his authority vs. my own judgment about what we both were seeing. His point -- as I only realized years later -- was that these weren't real soldiers, and they weren't carrying real weapons. But I think I didn't realize at the time that there still were real weapons still in the world. That would have been like real cowboys. (I did know there were revolvers, or at least handguns, since I would sometimes thrill to see policemen carrying them in their holsters.)

posted by william 2:15 PM
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