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

Thursday, March 31, 2005

I remember the loud pop of the free ball on pinball machines. Sometimes free games got you that pop as well. It was a mechanical sound, and it wasn't clear to me whether the machine was signaling the free ball or whether that was just the sound that it made when it shot another ball into the queue. The sound was peculiarly satisfying, partly because it wasn't the standard, informative buzz or bell. The pop made you feel how solid the metal was, the dense materiality and heacy substance of the free ball you'd won, shot forcefully into some below-surface ball-slot for your benefit, as though it were an object that belonged to you and not just the conferral of another evanescent and ephemeral turn.

posted by william 3:23 PM
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