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, February 15, 2005

I remember the glass wool that was part of the filter aparatus for my goldfish tank. The tank sat on top of my dresser, along (at one point) with the one for my gerbils. I remember packing glass wool -- but how tightly was always a question -- and charcoal together. I never thought to ask why, until now. And charcoal was familiar to me but glass wool wasn't. It came in plastic bags and you grabbed a handful like the cotton it resembled. But it wasn't cotton, and I was never sure whether I should worry about the possibility of its cutting me. I didn't quite get what it was -- steel wool made sense but glass wool not really. The glass wool was probably the great sensory novelty that having goldfish introduced me to: a substance I otherwise wouldn't have dreamed existed, that was interesting and different from the array of generic substances part of my familiar world. Somehow it seemed right that it went into the machine, the pump, as part of machinery, not part of the phenomena machines made possible. But I was the one putting it in, changing it, throwing it out, and so it changed slightly my view of the possibilities of substances.

posted by william 12:01 PM
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