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

Sunday, January 11, 2009

I remember Freddie Cooper challenging our touch football team, when we claimed that it was fourth down for his team, to name the plays. I was very impressed by his knowledge that this was a workable procedure. In particular he knew not only that I could do this, but also that I would see that I should be able to do this, that anyone would be able to list the last three plays, and that we'd all me able to evaluate the list, that memory wasn't just private, that the details of what has just happened was something we could all reconstruct, that the past was shared, part of everyone's present experience as past and not just ad result (down number).

posted by william 9:19 AM
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