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

Wednesday, March 02, 2005

I remember the Purple People (were they the Purple People Eaters? Or what was that?) -- the couple in the Park always dressed in tie-dyed purple and doing and distributing purplish things: a part of the landscape or ambience of the park; they had purple bikes and other purple implements. He was considerably older than she was, but seemed a convincingly free spirit, when most people didn't seem that way to me. They were part of the landscape, and now they're not there, and I don't know how many years it's been since I last thought of them, but somehow since then they've slipped out of the world, of which they had become an unremarkable feature.

posted by william 12:50 AM
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