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

Sunday, February 04, 2007

I remember other things around lie-detectors. Hugh C was interested in them (from Dragnet?) and said you could tell whether someone was lying by touching their hands to see if they got cold and clammy. But I think I knew about the technology before (I learned about voiceprints, I remember, on Mission Impossible or maybe I saw a show on them and then they showed up on Mission Impossible).

When I first found out about them, I thought you could find out whether God existed by using a lie detector. (Since Hugh was the first atheist I knew, he must have been connected to this plan too.) You could hook someone up and then ask them whether God existed. If they said no and they were lying, he did, just as if they said yes and the detector registered that they weren't lying, he did. I thought it was a truth detector, alas.

posted by william 11:44 PM
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