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

Wednesday, April 23, 2003

I remember that on rainy or snowy days they used to put down these long black grooved runners in the lobby of 175 Riverside Drive, One went from the door down the front hall to the two steps down into the lower lobby. Two would split off from there and lead to the elevator areas. In the winter they'd be rolled up in corners, waiting to be used. They were made of a black plastic, I think, although I thought of them as rubber. I have a bodily memory of the grooves affecting something wheeled. I can't think it was my bike, and I can't make it cohere with my sense of roller-skating through the lobby (if I ever did that). A scooter, maybe? Or some wheeled toy? A wagon? But I do remember both the way the grooves interfered with the smooth coriolus drifting down a bias of whatever the wheeled thing was, and also how strangely unpleasant they felt when you dragged your hand down them -- hard and unyielding. They looked, when covered with slush and melted snow, as though they ought to be soft, but they weren't. I think this was another one of those fingertip experiences like that of putting the papers flush under the glass top of my father's desk, and also like that of feeling the slats between the piano keys, which I would do a lot. I also liked the way the front of the white keys had a little ivory cliff-edge lip that you could push your fingertips into or push under your nails. But the grooves in the runners were another thing entirely -- part of the ambient and usually unnoticeable unpleasantness of life.

posted by william 4:14 PM
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