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

Tuesday, January 06, 2004

I remember Tug McGraw, "the fireman," the Mets' ace reliever. You could always count on him (although I remember one shocking time that he lost a game). He made me realize that there were different ways of being supreme. The Mets had this incomparable starting staff. And then, late in the game, in a region of the game you couldn't even contemplate when it started, as though the game had gone like the USS Enterprise through some gate or channel or warp in space to a differently configured universe, there was this other incomparable pitcher who would come in, who you weren't even thinking of as part of the staff during the sunny daylit start of the game, Tug McGraw. RIP.

posted by william 8:13 PM
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