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

Friday, March 08, 2002

I remember the Audobon Theater on -- what, 165th street? Much later I found out that Malcolm X was shot there. My grandfather used to drive me up to Washington Heights, and when we took the 158th street exit and went straight up to Broadway, we would pass the magnificent marquee of the Audobon on our right (on the East side of Broadway). I remember another time that he drove me uptown on Broadway (I used to love the way the IRT surfaced and then submerged again) instead of the West Side Highway or Riverside, when we passed the striking students at Columbia. The gates were closed and police were lined up on Broadway, and a student with longish hair in jeans walked down the top of a structure set-off from a building at the same level as the top of the fence just to peer up and down Broadway and then walked back. He seemed very adult and very competent -- a person who knew what he was doing within this important event.

I remember another theater on, I think, 180th and Broadway -- where Broadway started going a little funny -- where the Reverend Ike used to preach.

I remember new wall paper: sports stuff and books on shelves. I remember when they put it up, but not really what was underneath. Baseball mitts and balls, and caps. Dark brown on light tan. I remember looking at the seams where the patterns broke, and the way it started peeling from near the ceiling.

I remember the ceiling over my bed, and, in particular, when we came back from Europe one August, noticing the lights the busses going down Riverside Drive cast through the window onto the ceiling. I could never quite figure out the geometry of this.

I remember sitting on the radiator (enclosed in a tin box with a lattice front, whose top swung open so you could put a pan of water right on the radiator itself) when it was icy outside, and warming myself up, my back to the cool glass as my bum baked. I remember also pressing my forhead to the cool window and sometimes rolling it back and forth and feeling the waviness of the glass. I remember standing on the radiator as well, leaning back into the wooden lattice of the window.

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