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, June 06, 2003

I remember the very useful term "Sunday driver." I feel that it isn't part of the lexicon any more. It referred to people who only drove on Sundays and who were consequently very bad, hesitant, frustrating co-denizens of the roads. My parents used the term a lot when we were trying to get somewhere on a weekend. Now, I guess, if you have a car you tend to use it every day.

I remember also one day in Stormville when my father and I were driving to Lake Carmel one morning -- maybe for the newspaper -- his suddenly screaming "Stupid idiot" at the car in front of him, after it made a left turn. I asked him why he did that, and he said that it was because the driver hadn't signalled, which I guess caused him to slam on the brakes. (At that age I didn't notice or think about stopping short. Cars went; they stopped.) This was the first time I heard about signalling, or rules of the road, or the advisability of letting the car behind you know that you were slowing, or that you had to slow to make a turn. But I had really asked the question for another reason: Why was he yelling at a car? Since of course the driver wouldn't hear him. His answer was interesting enough that I accepted it though without further inquiry.

I remember another time we went around a circular driveway -- also in Stormville, I think, at some office (maybe the DMV or the post office or a school -- at ten miles an hour. I couldn't believe how slow we were going, and he told me that we were doing 10 mph which then became my reference point for dead slow. But when I said we were going slower than walking speed he laughed and said I couldn't run as fast as we were driving. Somehow I checked this out shortly afterwards -- I think maybe we passed someone running and we were only doing 10 mph. That was a strange experience -- to feel that near immobility in the car turned out to be something vastly different from going on foot. It was very puzzling, and while it seemed to redound to the credit of the amazing power of cars to get you through space, it also seemed to make the world a less reliable place: it wasn't what it seemed, even in the most basic experience you could have of it, or the framework of any experience you could have of it, which was that of moving around in it and seeing what was there. Motion itself wasn't the intuitive thing it seemed to be, and so this was one of my early experiences of the world's instability. Space itself, as disclosed by motion, was volatile. As the fact that I remember my reaction may show, I didn't like this (though to tell the truth it's not like it bothered me a lot either).

posted by william 11:40 AM
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