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, March 02, 2004

I remember that I didn't know how I was able to swing objects attached to string looped around my finger. I can't even remember what it was I liked swinging (though somehow I have a mental connection to a Venetian blind in my parents' bedroom -- perhaps I was swinging something in front of their window when this question occured to me). But the kind of thing I would swing would be pendants or stones attached to laces or cords. Maybe a compass on a cord or something like that. What I liked was the centrifugal force that kept them going in perfect circles (though I wasn't sure about this) around my finger. I could control what I was swinging, but didn't quite know how. I'd watch my finger, but if I slowed down enough to see what I was doing the object would stop swinging. It was interesting to have this skill whose details I had no command of.

I remember that I learned about centrifugal force from Hugh Cramer. I heard it as "centrificle" force.

posted by william 9:00 PM
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