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, December 29, 2018

I remember cards my parents used to receive (and send too, I think) whose sentiment was "Season's Greetings." They had green wreaths on them -- at least that's how I remember all of them. I remember being slightly puzzled and maybe a little disturbed by not quite knowing what the cards meant. Season for me meant one of the four seasons, and this clearly wasn't a reference to any of them, even winter. And I didn't know how the season was greeting us, so I didn't know what greeting meant in that context either. The exchange of these cards seemed part of some adult etiquette, some interaction that belonged to a world I wasn't part of, like my parents' business correspondence, or the bills that came, or the taxes they did. The language was close enough to language I knew to recognize the words, but their meaning was opaque to me. Since these cards were clearly supposed to make you happy, or wish you well, their opacity was a little bothersome, even unpleasant.

posted by William 10:42 AM
. . . 1 comments

Sunday, December 23, 2018

I remember that I was always subliminally confused about Frank Borman (the astronaut) and Martin Bormann (the Nazi). My parents talked a lot more about the latter -- I think there was a rumor he'd actually escaped to Argentina, and it seemed a vague pity to me that he should have been part of the Apollo project. This was of coursed influenced by the true pity that Wernher von Braun was so central to the American space program. (I used to confuse Argentina with Arizona; hence my not getting the joke about Goldwater being "still alive and living in Argentina.")

posted by William 7:18 PM
. . . 0 comments

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