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

Monday, March 11, 2002

I remember manual elevators. The elevator was a cage, and the operator took you up and down with a manual throttle. The floor numbers were painted in large numerals between floors. You had to keep your fingers in or they'd be cut off. It would sometimes take two or three adjustments on arrival before you were level. Then the elevator man would open the cage and then the outside door. I think they still have these in factories, etc., but not in passenger elevators any more -- too labor intensive.

I remember a kid in school -- I think a year ahead of me: second grade maybe? -- who was missing several fingers. My downtown grandfather had a little joke where he'd put his thumb down into his palm and pretend he'd lost it. I was imitating this joke at school, and this kid showed me how much more effectively he could do it. I was impressed. Then I could swear when he was done that he had all his fingers. But it turned out later that he didn't -- maybe a day or two later I found this out. The power he had over the rest of us!

I remember that there was a closed 91st street station on the IRT. Between 86th and 96th you'd go through this ghost station. It was lit up -- later I think I found out that this was because it attracted homeless people, and the MTA either wanted to scare them or wanted to make it safer for them -- but not even the local stopped there, and it was wonderfully eerie.

I remember "No salga afuera!" Also "Little Enough to Ride Your Knee? Little Enough to Ride for Free!"

posted by william 3:45 PM
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