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

I remember that in New York when you walk down the street -- if you're male at any rate -- you're actually supposed to jostle other people walking the other way -- males at any rate. There's a kind of pleasurable thunk of shoulders that is part of the city experience. Other people deny this, but I noticed after I went away to college that when I came back I was avoiding the thunk, as you do elsewhere, swerving to give the guy coming toward me space, and whenever I did this a look of unconscious puzzlement would appear on his face and he'd swerve towards me to try to make the shoulder-to-shoulder contact. When I stopped swerving, everything went on with the satisfying predictablity of before. My friend Deborah Gordon, who works on harvester ant colonies, is very interested in how the colony as a whole stores and conveys information. (See her Ants at work.) Part of it has to do with the contacts that ants make with each other, when they touch antennae. The greater the frequency of contact, the more that's going on, and each ant knows this. The systematic contact itself stores a kind of colony-wide attitude and posture. I think the same thing happens in New York (although the ants are female, and we thunkers are male. But maybe women jostle each other too). The number of times you thunk into someone determines how busy, how urban, and how dense with real and committed New Yorkers the streets are on a particular day. Jostling on the streets is good: it means that everyone has something urgent to do, but it's not all the same urgency, like running from the WTC, since you jostle people going the other way. And in the midst of it all we celebrate New York, because rushed as we are we still like that split-second slow-down that the contact causes and records.

posted by william 9:11 PM
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