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, January 21, 2004

I remember one of the first movies I remember. My father took me to see it -- it was in color, and it was about an American astronaut who goes into space and finds that there's a beautiful Russian stowaway cosmonaut in his capsule. They're very elegant in the spacious, well-lit, penthouse-like environs of the capsule. I seem to think she has a gown and he has evening clothes. It might be that she's a cosmonaut in a Russian ship that gets into trouble, and she has to get into his capsule. But her weight means that the flight plan won't work and that they'll die, as the elegant astronaut tells her. But before that, they have love.

How much of this is made up I don't have the foggiest. I am putting together what I remember seeing -- the orange motifs of the penthouse-capsule, and what I remember my father explaining to me as we watched. I wonder as well whether this isn't a George Pal movie, whose version of H.G. Wells' Time Machine I recently saw -- costumes and hairstyles a prototype of the original Star Trek

posted by william 5:12 PM
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