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, October 26, 2006

I remember not understanding why Casper the friendly ghost had a round head when all the other ghosts had a little triangle of sheet jutting upwards where their cowlicks would have been. (I now realize those triangles must have been meant to represent the corner of a sheet. Or maybe not?) Casper couldn't have been bald -- he was too young. And it turned out the angled ornament could be found on other juvenile ghosts too, friends of Casper's, and not just adult ghosts. I liked Casper's cue-ball smoothness, which went with that sense he gave of always smiling. But I just didn't understand the iconography on a purely surface level.

posted by william 11:35 PM
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