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

Wednesday, December 08, 2004

I remember going to the gas station once and being served by an attendant smoking a cigarette. I knew you weren't supposed to do that. My parents asked him what he was doing, and he told them, with an air of great expertise, that if you pour gasoline on a lit cigarette it would put the cigarette out. I didn't know whom to believe -- him as someone who did this for a living, or my parents who after all were this time in sync with the government warnings: extinguish cigarettes. I thought the attendant was probably right, that is right most of the time, but that it might be a stupid thing to do anyhow. This was one of those instances where I tried to picture what would happen. It was hard to imagine the cigarette not going out if you poured a liquid on to it.

I remember that when I was much younger my mother told me that a diamond was the hardest substance in the world. I was very impressed by this, which came up with respect to her diamond ring, and my uptown grandmother's. (I associate this memory with the terrace outside my grandmother's building, overlooking the river.) But thinking about it, I had challenged her, asking her whether a cinder block dropped on a diamond wouldn't crush it. (I think I'd just got interested in cinder blocks. At the time I thought, somehow, they were solid. I remember it was later that I discovered they were not just very large cement bricks.) She said it would, but that this didn't matter, since that was just a question of scale (though she didn't put it that way, naturally.) Of course, we both were wrong. A picture held us captive -- we couldn't picture it otherwise, even though it was otherwise, just as with the gasoline and the cigarette. I was just as glad to get away from the gas station: my parents might have been wrong, but in this case that embarrassing possibility didn't seem as important as usual.

posted by william 1:51 AM
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