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, September 29, 2009

I remember later on being shocked when a bulb I was trying to change broke. I tried to unscrew the base from the inside and of course shocked myself when I did that. I think this was the second time I was shocked. Ken H used to like to stick screw drivers into electric outlets, just for the brief thrill. Did the current go through because we were grounded? Anyhow, I did that once by accident, when I was following Hugh's example and unscrewing the plate so I could attach a grounding wire to the screw that held it in. The bulb was worse, but they were both so weird. I suddenly knew what a live current meant (on dry cells the picture wire we improvised with just got very hot), but it wasn't what I would want to think of as life. The electric chair seemed very strange after that: the living perception of a live current meaning death.

posted by William 12:18 PM
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