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, October 21, 2008

I remember the pleasure of snapping off model pieces from their plastic branches, where the little twigs that held them just gave when you bent sharply. I remember how much more interesting it was to break the branches themselves, once they were completely plucked, and how interesting the unpainted dull interior of the plastic was, serious and undynamic and prosaic. I remember how tragic it was when you snapped a piece of the actual model in the same way, and got the same bland and useless interior facing which had just been a lovely painted-costume arm or leg. The snaps were always clean, and always seemed to mean a kind of dull and implacable substrate within existence itself. I remember that sports trophies were gilded versions of the same material, made of the same ineluctable plastic, and that you could easily snap off the athletic arm or leg on the trophy and just be left with that kind of cool, somehow always concave facet of indifference (the part that snapped off would be convex, but we paid no attention to that useless relic).

posted by william 10:23 PM
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