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, March 17, 2004

I remember a Batman comic where a check forgery or document forgery was discovered through this counterintuitive insight on Batman's part: two signatures matched exactly, but Batman pointed out that you never sign your name the same way twice so one was a forgery of the other. I found this much more interesting than the idea that no two snowflakes are alike, since signatures were also supposed to be recognizable and consistent. I liked the fact that consistency was not the same thing as replication. (I think this comic affected, for good and ill, how I came to read "Signature Event Context" in grad school.)

posted by william 2:24 PM
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