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

Saturday, April 26, 2003

I remember that one of the things I loved about our new apartment, 7-F, when we moved there from 2-G (I was eight), was the fact that there were buttons that made the doorbell buzzer sound in every room. In the pantry there was a big indicator box over the door to the hallway which had little cards or vanes that would drop down to say which room had buzzed. (Like the old cash registers that pop up individuated prices -- I think they go up by nickels, and then by half-dollars.) Then you'd reset the box. It was so the servants could see who had buzzed. I wonder whether anyone in that apartment ever used it that way -- it must have been a relic from when the building was built, in the twenties. I seem to remember that when we first moved in my mother would occasionally use it to summon us (me? the housekeeper? my father?), but the box was erratic, we always forgot to reset it, running for the door or whatever room we thought the buzzing was coming from, and the front door was so near it anyhow that we'd always check. Besides the box indicated rooms by number, and the only obvious ones were 1 for front door and 2 for back. It was too temperamental (and I think one of the vanes never reset) for us to be sure what the numbers of the other rooms were, though I think my parents' was 3. The real pain in that apartment was that you'd go to the front door when the back door was buzzing, and that's what the box would have been useful for tracking. But it just wasn't accurate enough. But it was a gas when a friend came over to play with ringing the buzzer from various rooms -- especially if the friend didn't know about it, and we were playing hide and seek both inside and outside the apartment: you could flush your friend out by making him think you were outside. Later I think my sister and I would startle each other with the apparent arrival home of our mother at inopportune times. I'd ring the buzzer from my room, then look through the peephole and tell her that Mom was home, sending her into a panic.

posted by william 7:50 AM
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