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

Monday, May 14, 2007

I remember that someone brought in an oscilloscope to our fourth or fifth grade class. It might have been a teacher, or maybe a parent at the behest of a teacher. I think we saw it in the lobby where we lined up every morning and had recess in bad weather, and had our class pictures taken. I remember that the teacher explained that it displayed sounds on a screen -- a round, graphed screen like the radar screens from old movies. (In movies now radar screens seem more updated; I hated the way everything they detected vanished right after the sweep, and couldn't see how air-traffic controllers kept track of these disappearing blips.) We talked into it, and the sounds we made were turned into a thin, jagged, uninteresting line. It was chastening to think that all our talk turned into this tenuous and information-poor graph. I think though that I projected that feeling on to a kind of disappointment at the machine itself, which could only get that nugatory scribble out of the human voices of my friends, voices that were saying meaningful things; but more meaningful still, voices I could recognize as containing all the richness of their presence.

posted by william 8:30 AM
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