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

Friday, September 08, 2006

I remember that there were two kinds of waterfountains in the park -- older, rougher concrete ones with lots of little pebbles mixed in, and newer sleeker cement ones: just the cement, no concrete. The older ones had larger spouts, the newer ones again seemed more modern because their spouts were smaller, more tapered, more advanced, less like a shotgun, more like a ray-gun. Although I didn't make the connection at the time (perhaps because these two ways of shaping the outside environment -- especially of the park -- may have seemed like natural kinds to me, eternal types) I remember too that park benches were of both kinds of material. The older ones were concrete and had larger slats; the newer ones cement, more rounded (like the water fountains), and with thinner slats, more stream-lined bolts, painted a darker khaki green.

posted by william 1:11 AM
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