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

Saturday, August 05, 2006

I remember crossing our backyard to play basketball with Michael Clurman on his driveway, one Saturday morning. (He was great at foul shots.) As I crossed over I could hear the smack of the ball on the pavement as he slammed the ball down in his dribbling, waiting for me. I was far enough away that the sound and the sight were perfectly out of sync, the ball hitting silently, and the bang only coming as it reached his hand again. We'd just learned about the speed of sound, and I loved this confirmation of it. The only other time I've seen so perfect an illustration was watching someone hammering from half a street away, so that I heard the bang of the hammer when it was at its zenith. I think I liked the way the distance from the activity to me mirrored the distance the ball or hammer traveled, so that the sound I heard was like the displacement onto a much elongated horizontal axis of the vertical movement that produced it. (I can also concentrate on a similar but less obvious effect if I'm seated far from the stage at a concert, and especially in Family Circle at the Met, but then I'm not listening to the music.)

posted by william 11:38 AM
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