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, October 04, 2009

I remember when Searchers (the Outward Bound type program that three high schools did together) set up an underwater test for us. We were supposed to swim four widths of the pool underwater, about a minute and a half. We were supposed to practice getting over CO2 panic by hyperventilating and then holding our breaths for two minutes. I never could. Then when the test came I did maybe one-and-a-half widths. It was pure and irresistible temptation; once you saw you weren't going to make it it was impossible to get yourself to suppress the desire to breath for even one more completely pointless second.

posted by William 2:21 PM
. . . 1 comments
Comments:
Ha! I remember when you did or were going to do a 3-day solo. I think it was the first time I heard the word besides Star Trek (Mr. Solo.
I equated it with an initiation rite and I was astounded that you'd be all alone without food for three days in the wild (did you ever?)
When I was in high-school i did a 24 hour solo in Colorado. Only water, no flashlight, just a sleeping bag and paper and pen. I looked forward to it as the day i would work out all my problems... Don't know about that, but I did meet parts of myself!

# posted by caroline : 7:47 AM

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