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, February 27, 2002

I remember street-crossing lights that were only red and green, and when they started putting in yellow lights and Walk / Don't Walk signs, and push-buttons to cross. Before that, you crossed on the green, and the red and green would both be on simultaneously for two seconds before the light turned red. I remember not knowing exactly what the blinking Don't Walk meant when it came on. I mean I knew it meant that the light would soon turn red -- I just didn't see exactly what I was being told: the content of the instruction made no sense. The old lights were flat, without the peaked tubing that makes it hard for drivers to see when the light is about to change for the cross-traffic. I liked those snub-nosed lights: at about the same time they were modernizing the busses in New York, and I remember liking the old busses, also snub-nosed and of a lighter green, more than the new aerodynamic busses that leaned forward into the wind. The Number 5 route (on Riverside) tended to use the old busses more, the 104 (parallel to the 5 for long periods on Broadway) tended to be newer. At that time there were also a few of the older IND subway cars with their plaited straw seats left, but I much preferred the new cars. The homely busses and traffic lights seemed much more like family, somehow.

I remember asking my mother what made the lights turn red and green. She said that a "governor" did it, and I imagined Governor Rockefeller, somewhere to the North of Spuyten Divel, sitting in a sort of lighthouse like structure overlooking the Palisades, flicking a switch every minute and a half to change the lights. I knew people wanted to be governor, and that seemed to me an interesting and obviously adult combination of desire for power with civic duty. I remember specifically that she said the lights changed every minute and a half; I now know that this is not true, but it's part of my temporal intuition -- a minute and a half for me means not 90 seconds but something both longer and shorter: how long you had to wait for the light to change on 90th and West End when you were five or so.

posted by william 7:03 AM
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