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 29, 2006

I remember a movie my father took me to, in which the adult who is helping the hero through his exotic adventures somewhere in the East -- and who might have been Yul Brynner -- fights an enemy, the King's champion, in a contest watched by the King and his minions, which takes place on a rope web over open barrels of what my father said was boiling water. The enemy falls halfway into one, and tries to get out, and fails and sinks and dies. I was puzzled -- how could hot water kill him? Later I realized it was boling oil. It was a thrillingly puzzling movie, and I don't remember much else about it. But I do remember the fight, the balancing on the web, the fall into the barrel and the victory of the person we were rooting for, and my father's explanation (like his explanation at the end of Limelight that Charlie Chaplin was "very sick" when they drew the sheet up over his face after what had been up to then the hilarious last act).

posted by william 5:54 PM
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