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

Tuesday, May 06, 2008

I remember being very impressed by the serrated teeth on the first real saw I ever looked at. Cartoon saws looked like large knives. But when the Herings bought their house in Stormville I first saw real-life versions of cartoon items, like wheelbarrows, fireplaces, and cinderblocks. I remember thinking that all those little blades were really clever.

This thought was part of the more generalized relation to the world I was learning about then: the kind of nodding assent I gave to the way things worked. (I mean things made by humans.) I assented with pleasure, and some pride in the transparency of my understanding, to the way others had thought these things through and put them together. Chickenwire on the school windows so we wouldn't fall out. Stamped texture on the aluminum alloy floors so we wouldn't slip. It was all so marvelous.

posted by william 9:44 AM
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