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, September 16, 2006

I remember taking the public buses to school in Jerusalem—no. 3 or no. 20. I remember that there were the new buses, with buttons you pressed to request the next stop, and the older buses, which had a pull-string running along above the windows. I couldn’t reach the string, though I could reach the buttons, and I remember sitting on an older bus with increasing anxiety as we got closer and closer to the center of town and nobody rang the bell, debating with myself which grown up to ask to pull the string for me. And I remember hearing American pop music on the buses—music I never listened to at home because my father played only classical on the radio—songs like “Morning Train” and “Brass in Pocket.”

posted by Rosasharn 11:12 PM
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