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

Monday, September 08, 2008

I remember how interesting and arcane it was that the vacuum cleaner cord retracted. I didn't know how it did this, only that the cord of the unplugged machine was almost flush with its cylindrical body. Then one day I was allowed to vacuum too. They must have judged rightly that I was old enough to use it, because when I pulled the cord -- like pulling a shade -- I had a confident anticipation that it would go scrolling back, and it did. I knew too that if it didn't go all the way back, I'd only need to pull it sharply out a little more and then let it go. Still I liked the way it snaked back into its hole.

And that reminds me of the even earlier days when I was strictly forbidden to pull on the shades. Even now it seems a slight violation of the rules for me to do so.

Venetian blinds, which we got later, were ok (I was allowed to use them before I was allowed to pull the shade cords) and I felt kind of expert -- like a foreshadowing of a child's VCR expertise -- at detaching the looped string from whatever ratchet or catch that pulling it to the side to form a hypotenuse detaches it from, so that I could pull the blind up or even let it go all the way down!

I still like that feel -- in plugs and shades and Venetian blinds -- of the satisfied sensing of what's going on in the works by feeling the live elastic pull or unsnagging of the cord. It makes you feel part of the world those objects form and preside over, like you belong there too with them, able to feel and work their hidden parts.

posted by william 12:10 AM
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