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

Saturday, January 10, 2004

I remember how the status symbol among the kids I hung out with in junior high was a Cross pen. I remember all about them, and I'll try to post some more soon: but what I'm vividly remembering today is the interesting stand Ronnie Rogers took on never lending anyone his pen: he said that he wanted to think of everything that that pen ever wrote as being written by him. This made a lot of sense at the time. (Later it made more reasonable sense when we jealously guarded our grad school Mont Blanc pens, because the nibs were supposed to conform to the owners' handwriting. But Ronnie's pen was a ballpoint.) I liked this idea: it seemed to take the very act of writing seriously, the physical act of putting ink on a page. I hadn't thought of that, and it was an interesting new thought. ("Who would write," asks Freud, "if he thought that the ink coming out of the pen was like sexually violating the page?" But I hadn't thought of anything like that yet.) I was somewhat disappointed in Ronnie, though, when his brownnosing trumped his romantic commitment to exclusive use of his pen, and he lent it to a teacher who had to sign some mimeographed form for him. I expressed my dismay, but he gave me a superior smile. I asked to borrow the pen then since it no longer was the exclusive instrument of his own expression. But he wouldn't lend it to me: now it belonged to him and the teachers, and the rest of us were excluded.

posted by william 3:26 PM
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