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

Tuesday, April 23, 2002

I remember Stingray bicycles. Their descendents are still around, but they don't have that futuristic look. They were great to do wheelies on, and looked cool going down hill, but otherwise, not so efficient. They had impressive fenders, which helped change my mind about fenders: Hugh Cramer always took them off his bike as unnecessary weight, and eventually I took them off mine as well. Hugh was the first person in my acquaintance to get a ten speed, with racing handlebars. I got one too, eventually.

I remember the speedometer/odometer I got. (I think this is when I learned the word odometer). I wanted one for a long time and finally got one for my birthday. You had to put it on, which involved a lot of cables twisting by the brake and gear cables. As with the training wheels, when it was finally on I thought there was something wrong, because it kept clicking -- this was in the bad old mechanical days -- every time the wheel turned. This was annoying and seemed to me to slow down the bike, and seemed to indicate that things weren't in working order. But someone -- maybe my Chelsea grandfather -- explained how it worked. This was another in that long series of lessons about trade-offs, which include the training wheels and the James Bond automatic with the broken plastic nub, which life never seems to be done teaching. I remember seeing how fast I could go -- thirty mph -- down hill in Central Park, on Tuesday nights when we'd all go riding in the summer. There is also a huge hill in Riverside Park at 91st street, but you can't go down that hill looking at your speedometer because you'll get killed if you don't watch where you're going. (This is the pathway down the same hill that formed our sledding amphitheater just to south.) I remember figuring out exactly how far a mile was on the Promenade (from 91st street to about 81st), so that I could figure out how far I was running in the morning. (I started running because of Hugh Atkinson's The Games: see earlier entries). You ran down to the memorial to the six million, around it on the flagstone inlay, back on the other side, and twice around the "key" back on the uptown end. I remember that the speedometer would swing wildly as I peddled and pumped, so like a scale it wasn't accurate and you worked hard to make it flatter you and then believed its flattery.

I remember my father teaching me how to ride a bike, and how to brake. I remember falling a few times, and finally getting it, and I remember his telling me that once you learn you never forget. I remember also learning the phrase "stop on a dime" when he taught me to ride: he said you could slam on the (pedal) brake and "stop on a dime," a phrase I really liked. Later I liked that Renata Adler used it in the last sentence of her pretty good novel Speedboat: I remember it as "Perhaps the kind of sentence one wants here is one that moves and walks and sways and bounces and then just stops--right on a dime."

I remember that there is an exit East and out of the park on the promenade after about a quarter of a mile (with stairs after a few yards), and another exit, lonelier and less travelled west and down towards the river after about another eight of a mile. That second one always seemed mysterious to me, even after I started taking it. It led down to the abandoned train tracks and huge arched storage spaces, some walled up, others not, below the Promenade. Homeless people didn't live there then, though they do now. It seemed a wonderful and mysterious world down there, and one that I would explore when I was a bit older. That was in the times of a promising futurity, in which all sorts of things of interest to me then promised to unfold themselves. I remember this sense of things, which also took the form, whenever I had an experience that I somehow didn't play quite right, of a sense of "next time." That next time meant something like: when this life repeats again. Next time I'm six I won't say that cruel thing to my mother. Next time I'm in first grade I'll work harder in trying to keep up with copying the material written on long white sheets of paper and hung from the metal above the blackboard. Somehow this anticipated repetition seemed very clear to me then, and I think I only completely lost it as an expectation after graduate school.

posted by william 3:28 PM
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