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, June 22, 2006

I remember wondering, when I first got a toy gun, what the sighting tab at the end of the barrel was for. Hugh explained that guns recoiled, and that the tab allowed you to compensate for the fact that the barrel would rise when you fired. I remember being surprised to learn about the recoil, since in the TV shows and movies I watched they were just like magic wands, almost: you aimed and the other person either dodged out of the way or went down. I wonder now whether he was right that the tab wass to compensate for the recoil, rather than just a way to judge more accurately where the barrel was pointing.

posted by william 10:47 PM
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