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, December 02, 2010

I remember seeing Yellow Submarine in the theater. I remember Steve's Ice Cream. I remember going to Harvard Square on summer nights and the street magicians singing If I knew you were coming I'd have baked a cake. I remember playing in a park outside a Catholic high school and my mom's distress that the girls all smoked while the boys played ball. I remember a sunny field at MIT. I remember a park a car-ride away that had a herd of letter-animals in orange plastic. I remember ball games late on Saturday afternoons. I remember the bitter cold, sitting in the yellow VW, and the realization that it just wasn't going to start.

posted by Rosasharn 7:30 PM
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