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

Monday, May 08, 2006

I remember being fascinated by coins in fountains. There was a fountain with coins in it at the Chinese restaurant in White Plains that we used to go to with the Schubins. It had several tiers, and there were coins in each, though most on the bottom. I thought, of course, of how much money I could have if I fished them out. But I was also fascinated by the way they were evidence of adult savoir-faire. Adults, people with money in their pockets, people with enough money in their pockets to toss some away knew the appropriateness of tossing these coins into the fountain, and the appropriate way to do it. The coins stood for this knowledge. There they were, emissaries of the adults who had thrown them, cool as cucmbers, imperturbable in the rightness of their being there. The coins were adult too, took on the adult quality of those who knew to toss them there. They weren't an index of childish desire, for candy or comics or baseball cards. They were completely themselves, self-sufficient and at home in the world, and they represented the competence that made them this way.

posted by william 8:37 AM
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