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

Wednesday, January 11, 2023

I remember finding staples in my mother's desk drawer (I remember her desk, in blond wood, was far less imposing than my father's Dark wood desk) -- finding staples and being fascinated by them. I didn't know that they came apart and got formed by the stapler into the every-day double-bowed tucks in magazines and comic books. I had no idea that they were the same things. My mother warned me they were sharp and dangerous, which surprised me. A train or cuboid or block of of new staples seemed to me like adult Legos. But they came apart so easily! And then when she showed me how the stapler worked, able to select and push a single staple at a time through the bottom front of the staple-holder -- and requiring the bottom target to curl the staple's ends and give it its well-formed beauty, despite the danger -- all this seemed magical. The adult implement was real magic. And I felt for years after -- still do I think -- like someone with some claim on competent belonging to the wondrous adult world whenever I refilled a stapler.

posted by William 6:25 PM
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