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, April 14, 2003

Thinking about elevators, I also remember touch operated capacitor (see 2/28/2002) elevator buttons. You just touched the panel and it would light up indicating the elevator was coming. But this was in the age of ambiguous light semiotics. Sometimes the light would go on when you punched a button, sometimes not. I remember being driven crazy by this in my downtown grandmother's building. You'd hit the button, the light would go on; then after a while it would go off. Why? Did its going on mean that it acknowledged that you'd hit it? Did its going off mean it had given you up? Or could you only get the elevator to register your request when the light was off? I never could make rhyme or reason out of the whole thing. But at least her elevator didn't have those touch panels. You'd see people jabbing panels that didn't register pressure when the illumination went off, or the elevator didn't come. Nothing more frustrating than not even feeling the button yield to your push. (Like those early push buttons on traffic lights that had no spring to them. It was like pushing on a blank pole. You never knew whether you'd pushed the button at all.) They got rid of touch panel buttons because in fires the elevator would go straight to the floor that was burning, the hear having registered on the panel as touch.

I thought of this September 11, just because I'd been surprised as a child by the stupidity of people using elevators in a fire at all, and then had noticed a bit later the appearance of the now ubiquitous panels warning against using elevators in a fire. That somehow made the use of elevators in a fire something that you would do only if you had no choice, and it seemed that anyone getting into an elevator in those circumstances was doing something very grim and dangerous indeed: like the people who tried to escape by elevator, and the fire fighters who used them to go up. I remember the elevators in the World Trade Center. They went very fast, but with great calmness. They were tactful elevators. They maintained a kind of polite aplomb about where you were going, and who you were with. They knew what they were doing. You felt their sheer competence. You walked down a long corridor to get to them, and it was a little like going down a receiving line to be announced to the serenely indifferent welcome of the host of the large gathering gathering there. I've been trying not to think about them since, but now I have.

I remember my various plans for surviving an elevator's plunging from its broken cable. I'd jump just before the car hit the ground. Then I would be ok. I remember sometimes jumping in the elevator at 175 Riverside Drive as it moved, testing my pre-Newtonian theory. You could make it shudder a little, which was slightly scary. I remember also perching on the handrail, or bracing myself with my ass on the handrail and my feet propped against the opposite wall. I think I thought that doing this would break my fall if the cable broke. I didn't have many other plans. Elevators these days don't seem to have handrails.

posted by william 11:19 AM
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