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


Saturday, September 04, 2004
I remember the first space walk, when I was at the Franklin School. I remember the photos of the astronauts outside their Apollo (?) capsule. But they were floating, not walking; somehow from the science fiction images that we'd absorbed before that we imagined them walking on the surface of the space ship but not falling even if they were walking upside down. I remember also finding it interesting that they had to be tethered. I seem to recall that one of them lost a hammer and that there was no way to get it back as it slowly floated away, just out of reach.


posted by william 8:42 AM
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