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, July 12, 2006

I remember that window shades used to have strings at the bottom from which hung a circular tug, so that you could pull them down or let them reel up without soiling or wrinkling the shade itself. (I don't know whether they still do: I can't picture them as being still around, but maybe they've just become invisible to me. I'll have to keep my eyes peeled.) What I remember though is the shades before I knew what the pulls were for. I wasn't allowed to touch the window shades, and I thought of the dangling circles as a combination of decoration and mysterious function, and therefore a siglum of esoteric adult knowledge: the circle with a line extending straight up.

posted by william 9:52 PM
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