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, March 07, 2008

I remember seeing "Loitering prohibited" signs and not quite knowing what they meant. I knew that loitering was more or less like littering. But there was something else that it meant too. It was odd to have a prohibition without a temptation: I couldn't have loitered, as far as I knew, if I'd wanted to. I couldn't picture any action whose name I didn't know that someone might want to forbid. I thought of loitering therefore as some teenage transgression -- some power of teenagers which had to be curbed; and the fact that they had this capacity and that the adults knew what this capacity was and could address them on the matter was another cause for me to celebrate a secret competence on which those two estates agreed, acknowledging each other's pertinent understanding. (I myself was pleased to know what the word "prohibited" meant -- a shared teenage and grown-up way to say "forbidden," but one I already understood.)

posted by william 5:47 PM
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