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, October 05, 2004

I remember "Warning warning danger danger!" -- the Robot going robot-shit on Lost in Space. I remember how it protected Will Robinson, whose whole name it always used. I remember it had a powerpack that Dr. Smith would remove when it went crazy with its warning system. I remember its articulated-tubing arms.

I remember realizing one day, to my extreme amusement, that Dr. Smith was the only person in the Robinson cohort to behave normally: fearing the terrifying, desiring the gratifying, seeking security, and comfort, and wealth. He was the only reasonable figure on the show. Who would behave differently? This was fun to see and to tell my friends, and I remember it as an experience of that silent-laughing hilarity where you just wheeze out a tiny bit of air, mouth open, sound at the very extreme of human pitch coming out with the wheeze. (I'm sure there's a physiological name for this, but I don't know what it is.)

posted by william 4:55 PM
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