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, February 14, 2012

I remember learning from some fun-fact compendium, maybe to give a comic book redeeming social value, maybe at the bottom of a Bazooka Joe cartoon slip, that the ancient Greeks had batteries. This seemed very cool, opening up a world of possibilities, as I imagined their D-sized cylinders (standard battery size in those days, D-size and the strange, asymmetrical, alien 9-volt batteries for my transistor radio) powering what had to be similar technology, because what else would the batteries be used for? I was relatively sure that they would find, in the rubble of Troy, bright plastic battery-powered cars and lights and things like that. I felt closer to the people of Troy and ancient Greece when I learned they had batteries: they now seemed cultures like ours, cultures that even back then produced the goods that our wonderful toy stores were full of. I imagined them in modern caps and wool coats playing with their battery-powered toys on sidewalks of their walled cities.

posted by William 8:37 AM
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