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

Saturday, September 11, 2004

I remember that a plane, an Air Force or Army Air Corps military vehicle, once crashed into the Empire State Building (in the late forties?) killing the pilot, I think, and no one else. Three years ago I called the Department office with some question on my cell phone, and the administrator asked whether I'd heard that a couple of planes had crashed into the World Trade Center. I assumed they were light planes and that this would be a fairly minor event. And when the tops of the buildings collapsed, I didn't realize that they'd brought the whole of the towers down with them. I assumed everyone had escaped, more or less, and didn't realize the scale of the thing till later that day. Then I thought of the saying "nine-days wonder," which I'd learned from an Orson Welles movie, and wondered myself whether this would be a nine-days wonder or whether it would be more significant than that. It was. I watched the Golf Channel that night, or maybe a day or two later, and found it very soothing.

posted by william 11:09 PM
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