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, October 16, 2004

I remember my Peace Sign ring, that I got out of a gum machine at the Garden Supermarket (maybe after it turned into Daitch Shopwell). It was one of those plastic rings with a gap at the antipodes of the display so that you could adjust it. It was a little tight, and I liked the feel of the plastic edges and played with it a lot. Part of it broke off, leaving an even sharper edge, but the rest was tight enough for me to continue wearing it. I fiddled with the sharp edge a lot, pushing it into my finger and worsening the chronic scab that it caused, taking a kind of pleasure out of that. And now I still have a kind of pin-point scar from doing this.

posted by william 7:20 AM
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