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

Thursday, May 07, 2009

I remember going out to Doug B's house, maybe upstate? And there were several motor-cycles there, including his brother's chopper, which he'd ridden to New Orleans and back -- a fact whose physical magnitude didn't impress me as much then as it should have. But it was still an epic journey, cross country and unbelievably cool, all of course in imitation of Easy Rider (which I hadn't seen). One reason I didn't realize the physical demands of such a ride was that I'd ridden Vespas in Italy. So I thought I knew how to ride a motorcycle, was feeling cocky, till I got on one. It was amazingly powerful when you gave it some throttle. And I didn't know you had to change gears. Doug showed me all about the clutch and the gearshift. But I kept stalling trying to get out of first. Accelerate really fast and stall. It's probably a good thing that I never managed to get into second.

posted by william 6:13 PM
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