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

Saturday, May 31, 2008

I remember (I thought I posted this but I can't find it, and I guess I didn't) -- I remember that my uptown grandparents called the wooden mallet which policemen carried around, what I'd now call a "billy club" and Trollope a "life preserver," a nightstick, a word I liked, I think because it suggested security, the idea that, like blankets and beds and lamps and interiors in general, it was one of the human objects benignly designed for benign night. I didn't even think about what it would mean to use it -- it wasn't even a threat, just a sign of authority, and the fact that it wasn't a gun (I was a little surprised later, in elementary school, I think during an election, to see a cop with a gun in his holster, a real gun, a real holster, right there, in my presence!) indicated how unlike the fantasy violent world of the movies the real world of my grandparents was. (How little I knew of their past then!)

posted by william 2:29 PM
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