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, November 24, 2008

I remember the first time I got adult-style pants: zippered fly, and they opened at the waist and buttoned at the top. What I had no idea about was the little metal clasp that held the top together even when the button was undone. This piece of hardware was like a sleek secret from adult life, not the lives of adults so much as the lives of adult trousers. This is how they were. Adults knew this. My father's plastic collar inserts were another version of the way clothing approached adults and expected them to behave. But I knew about those from the start, saw them in his little change dish with tokens and occasional cufflinks. The metal clasp was something else again, and seemed youthful and athletic: it was the kind of think you'd expect in kids' clothes but wasn't. It had a self-confidence to it, as though an extra bit of fastening for incompetent kids turned out to be a glinting standard feature of the adult world. It worked, it wasn't desparate addition but the very way things worked. It knew what it was doing, that clasp. It was so much more modern than buttons, which kept coming off. I couldn't even figure out how it was attached to the fabric. But I didn't have to. I could repose confidence in its previously unsuspected functioning.

posted by william 3:44 PM
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