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

Monday, July 04, 2016

I remember the drawer in the pantry for extension cords. They lay there like coiled, sleeping snakes, able to do wonders but somnolent now. Unlike other tools in the nearby drawers -- the light bulbs or nails or screws, my father called upon them for temporary tasks -- plugging in a radio or a movie projector or a light. Afterwards he'd return them to the drawer. So the extension cords seemed alive in a way that the other things didn't. They were allies my father could call on when he wanted to do something specific. They contributed to his intentions, which meant in some way that they had to understand and share them. There was no malevolence in them, because they were indifferent to me. But their indifference wasn't inert: it wasn't that they were just wire and insulation and metal. It was that they were incurious about me, since I wasn't the one about to use them for anything.

posted by William 2:19 PM
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