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

Friday, May 23, 2003

I remember that I liked the water cooler in my father's office when we'd go there Saturday mornings during "tax season." I liked the conical cups, and the way they only got soggy slowly. But what I was particularly interested in were the bubbles that would pop up every fifth or sixth drink (roughly when the cup got too soggy to use). I didn't -- and probably still don't -- understand why the air would build up, and then only suddenly and intermmitently burst out in bubbles: why wasn't there just a stream of bubbles, as when you pour water out of a bottle. (I suppose it has something to do with the fact that the cooler is pointed straight down, so that the water forms a seal which air only breaks through when pressure of the air trapped over the water is sufficiently reduced.) Water coolers now -- Poland Spring coolers, mostly -- tend to bubble up with much more frequency: pretty much every cup, which seems reasonable. Even so, though, the bubbles are sudden, and not a stream. I remember how much I liked experimenting with the water cooler, wondering whether the bubbles came more or less frequently as you got near the bottom, wondering whether they came at absolutely regular intervals. (But of course I couldn't keep track well enough to tell.) There was something comfortably authoritative, something pleasantly competent, about the sudden burst of bubbles, as though the cooler knew what it was doing. It was at ease in the office, just as my uptown grandfather was when I went to see him at his office (where I don't remember a water cooler) at Tricoma in the Empire State Building, though I have a vague memory of an outside hallway with a cooler at the end. It was rounded like him and its bursts of bubbles communicated a kind of jolly imperturbability like his.

posted by william 7:02 AM
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