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 25, 2002

I remember my grandmother's basement in Washington Heights (where she did the laundry with those silver coins). It was bright and airy: Haven Avenue was at the top of the heights, which fell precipitously towards Riverside Drive and the Hudson below. So the basement opened out onto a little planted courtyard, which itself led to a terrace overlooking the Hudson and the George Washington Bridge. This is where my grandfather taught me to shoot arrows slightly upwards. It was also in this courtyard one day that at four I decided that I couldn't understand death (I think because we came out of the basement into some dazzling light). It seemed to me that there was no way that my consciousness could cease to exist. I remember saying to myself that I might die, but then there would be someone else, like John or someone, and I would be conscious by having his consciousness. Since my own consciousness was the ground of anything I knew, it seemed inconceivable to me that it could disappear. (It sometimes still does.) I mentioned this theory to my parents, who named John my imaginary friend (a term I assumed at the time was right, like the sparks of my "sparks dream"), which shows either that they didn't understand what I was saying or that they did. I have a memory of going to the Bronx Zoo with my grandparents (though it might have been the Central Park Zoo), and seeing some elephants in a stall: one raised a bag of peanuts up so that I could see up its trunk, and I assumed that its whole trunk was full of garabage: that it somehow managed to pack garbage in and in like the garbage trucks that also fascinated me. For some reason I remember this scene as taking place in my grandmother's basement: maybe the quality of shade and of institutional green paint. When my grandmother was dying of a brain tumor, she went down to the basement in some sort of delusory haze, wanting to do something there -- travel, or return some food to the store -- which made a chilling sense to me because of my own confused memory of the elephants there. Columbia Presbyterian Hospital (from which, as she said after the diagnosis, "I go home to die") had since built some high rise buildings that block the light -- the view of the Hudson from the terrace. I somehow imagine that she went down there also seeking that missing light. And though it still seems inconceivable, I too no longer quite have confidence that the light and the view won't be closed up forever. I might be John now -- that would account for the continuity and the difference between me then and me now. But if so, John doesn't believe what his friend believed when John was only imaginary.

posted by william 7:36 AM
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