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 08, 2005

I remember putting a model or a puzzle or maybe even a connect-the-dots together to produce a ship, and the ship had a keel! I didn't know ships had keels, and I thought there was something terribly wrong with what I'd done, since there was this excresence coming out of what should have been the smooth bottom of the ship. It bothered me. What was this thing? I recall either my mother or her mother telling me what it was. I also didn't like the fact that it was somehow by definition tilted off the midline, both when it was represented and in the way it worked. It was an inelegant extrusion and something that by its nature was about the asymmetry of the ship's relation to the sea -- both of which challenged my sense of the proprieties. Howard Kheel, the actor, looked just right, later, for what I disliked about keels.

posted by william 9:11 PM
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