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

Saturday, April 08, 2017

I remember being puzzled that the weeklies -- The New Yorker and The Village Voice (Sports Illustrated too) -- were dated in the future. I found this very frustrating, because it meant I could never be current (and sometimes that mattered!). The future didn't actually have news about what would happen in the next few days, and when the date that the weekly was dated finally came along, the past was different from what the publication from the future reported or failed to report. So I felt a little as though news and time diverged, on the scale of a week, anyhow, and this was disorienting. It probably contributed to a sense of the difference between public and private -- the world of the future news which never became what the future publication suggested, and the world of what I knew, past news, assassinations, wins and losses, election results. That knowledge was part of my private world, but the weekly's potential other worlds were always seemingly just the news but always pointed to a time forever inaccessible. Maybe they do still.

posted by William 10:12 AM
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