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, June 11, 2008

I remember that if a little foil from your baked potato touches your fillings, you get an unpleasant shock. Your mouth turns into a battery. (I remember this though you may not. It doesn't happen with the fillings they use now.) The effect was interesting: not that suddenly you realized that you were a machine with hardware in your mouth that could produce a circuit. Quite the reverse: there was dear little me, the "dear self," and then this alien effect in my mouth (seat of selfhood says William James), and a kind of recoil inwards even away from my teeth, from this current flowing through me but which was not me, just the buzz of the world. I could experience it, but it was not me. It was the world betraying me a little, betraying me even within my mouth, even in the food I ate. But it wasn't me, and the betrayal wasn't that bad either, and seemed to limit the world's viciousness and incursion to the extent only of a practical joke. The world: that constant joker that produced cartoons and pranks and aluminum foil in the potatoes, and so went a bit too far, but only a bit really: and never for very long. I thought it would never do anything really mean.

posted by william 4:56 PM
. . . 0 comments

Tuesday, June 10, 2008

I remember the Rosemary Woods stretch.

posted by Carceraglio 11:11 PM
. . . 0 comments

Tuesday, June 03, 2008

I remember that when Jack D, Jonathan's father, picked us up to drive home from summer school at Cornell (before senior year of high school) there were two motorcycles in front of us on Route 17, both with couples on them, and he was very nervous driving behind them -- he thought that if they had any kind of accident he might kill them. I had been nervous too, watching them, but it was surprising to hear that he was nervous -- adult drivers in general seemed to me impressively serene as they drove.

posted by william 11:07 PM
. . . 0 comments

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