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

Sunday, April 18, 2004

I remember that a trinket you always used to get, in gum machines and party favor bags and purim loot, and carnivals, was a bubble level -- an inch long, yellow plastic and the bubble in the water. I didn't see the point (though Hugh Cramer explained how they worked to me), and couldn't do anything with them, except hypnotize myself moving the bubble around. And I didn't like the bubble, which I read as aesthetic imperfection, like the unevenness of training wheels. But I guess that actually levelling something would so centralize the bubble that it would get close to aesthetic satisfaction. Capillary action and friction prevented those small levels from working right, though, just as they compasses we also got as trinkets never pointed in the same direction -- again because of friction and inertia. I disliked that fact too.

posted by william 8:56 AM
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