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

Sunday, February 20, 2005

I remember being appalled the first time I saw or noticed adult scissors (I think they belonged either to my downtown grandmother who was a good seamstress [she'd worked in a glove factory in Paris and then I think in New York too as a youth and as a young immigrant] or to Sally Hoge). What appalled me was their asymmetry. The scissors we used in school, with our Elmer's glue and our collage-making, had two circular loops for our fingers. But these adult scissors had one loop for the thumb and that longer oblong squarish witch-like loop for the index and middle fingers. They were handed -- as I became aware when I tried to put them in my other hand and they wouldn't cut. So the blades weren't symmetrical either! Zippers were. I liked zippers. But not scissors.

In fact they probably entered into my dislike for the double-looped printed character g (in Times Roman or American Typewriter) which I posted about before, and which probably reminded me of the scissors, or at least revulsed me in the same way.

posted by william 7:06 PM
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