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, October 18, 2005

I remember that they'd close off 89th between West End and Riverside, I believe, with a sign embedded in concrete closing the street off school afternoons. I'd seen the sign many times before I read it and realized that the street was closed, and it was closed for us so that we could play in the street, as we weren't, I thought, ever supposed to -- though we did all the time: stoop ball, which only sometimes required you to run into the street, and stickball, where cars were bases. So here were the authorities actually abetting us. I liked that sign: it maintained its unsmiling, grown-up aplomb (after all, it was directed to adult drivers, and not to us) but it was put there for our benefit. One time they hadn't moved it into the street, and we tried to, and it turned out its concrete base on was really heavy.

posted by william 8:57 AM
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