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 24, 2005

I remember my red toy cable car. I think my parents brought it to me from Switzerland, or maybe my uptown grandmother. I'm not quite sure -- I think that like my London Bus it came from a place I hadn't been, but I remember it from a time when I would have already been in Switzerland. Anyhow it went from my dresser, or maybe my orange couch, up steeply to a corner in my room -- the cable was heavy black nylon. I liked the way it stayed vertical even as it climbed the steep angle of the string. I don't remember what it was anchored to up there. A nail? I remember playing with it with Hugh Cramer, and that it was the kind of toy that would look good in a store or in theory, but that you would never be able to set up in your own house so that it worked right (like the German steam engine of the same vintage). All those sorts of things did work right in Hugh's house -- balsa wood models, the go-kart he built. But my cable car did work as advertised or anticipated, which was great. When it derailed, it was easy to fix, and it didn't derail much.

posted by william 7:48 AM
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