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, August 04, 2003

I remember the night people. Sometimes when we were going home very late, we'd see late shift workers arriving or departing, and my uptown grandmother called them by that spooky and evocative term. They were the people who worked while the rest of us slept. I thought of them as a permanent population, like us and overlapping with us but also in a different world, awake while we slept and sleeping when we were awake. (I used to worry about whether they could sleep through the pneumatic drilling outside my school in the mornings.) They seemed ghostly to me, if only because they were so silent. Sometimes they showed end-of-the-work-day raucousness (those who were coming off-shift) but even that was muted and a kind of gesture towards noisiness rather than real noise. We'd see the night people near my uptown granparents' apartment, and now I realize they were the night shift and Columbia Presbyterian; and sometimes in Brooklyn, on Flatbush, where they were the telephone workers, gliding towards the subway.

posted by william 6:43 AM
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