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, April 20, 2004

I remember the little opaque plastic eye-shields that you would put over your eyes like pince-nez to lie under the sun and tan. They were improbably slight, but they kept the sun out, though you could see red at the rims of your closed eyes. I liked lying with them: they looked really neat when my mother (and others) used them. I remember that I thought the word was prince-nez (with an "r") until maybe college. I remember Natty Bumpo saying that even a blind man could tell the direction of the sun, I thought (and think) in the same way that I could tell it through closed eyes, because of the translucency of the eye-lid when struck full on by the sun. But he might have meant only that you could tell it by feel. I remember Peter Graves on Mission Impossible getting opaque eye-implants so that he could go under cover as a (particular) blind man, and not reveal his sightedness through involuntary reflex. The villain holds a match up to his face and Graves says, "Even a blind man can feel heat, Mr.____." And I remember another wonderful Mission Impossible in which they convince someone he's on a moving train leaving the country, but it's done in a barn with filmed scenery and a shaking mechanism -- a simulation, just as though it were in a film or TV studio.

posted by william 12:25 AM
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