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, December 25, 2012

I remember that on the palings on the construction site of a new building (the Columbia Med School Library, it would later turn out) near my uptown grandmother's house, someone had done a beautiful, half-block long graffiti mural of Jimi Hendrix in psychedelic colors, in which purple haze (and its logo) predominated, with the slogan "Excuse me while I kiss the sky." This was the sort of wedge into Jimi Hendrix for me: I recognized the line, then, when I heard it, and later recognized the significance of the purple haze. One of those striking visuals I'd pass every day, and over the months -- years, possibly, or maybe just in remembering it -- absorb enough context elsewhere to make more and more sense of it.

posted by William 1:06 PM
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