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

Wednesday, March 26, 2008

I remember the surprising smell and feel of my Superman costume. First of all that the cape tied around the throat, and didn't spring, in a sort of authoritative unfurling, from its epaulets, as it did on TV, then that the logo had the stiff and foreign feel that it did, not simply a printed part of the fabric design. I didn't really like that, except that at school I liked being able to feel it under my shirt - liked its inflexible presence, which wouldn't have been true of an undershirt. It made the S more visible though, through the fabric of my button-down, against which it pressed, which was a problem, and I'd fasten my coat before I said good-bye to my parents. I remember also having to hitch up my buttoned collar so that the top piping of the costume couldn't be seen over my shirt, since my parents absolutely wouldn't have let me wear it to school.

posted by william 11:33 AM
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