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

Thursday, September 11, 2003

I remember the World Trade Center being built, and how ugly everyone thought it was. I acquired and agreed with this judgment, and still do. I also didn't like the fact that my beloved Empire State Building was no longer the tallest building in the world. But I did like it that we now had the four tallest buildings: the Chrysler (which I knew about first of all from a book of Margaret Bourke-White's photos that we had, which also gave an account of her Parkinson's Disease, first I heard of that, and how she got some relief when they drilled a hole through her skull and then gave her some L-dopamine), the Empire State Building, and now the two featureless glass towers. Their relative heights also went into the hierarchies of size that Hugh Cramer and I were always establishing, and that I've mentioned here several times already. I remember going downtown to see them somewhat after they'd been completed, and looking up from the plaza below them to find that their height was hard to see and that you had to remind yourself that this radically foreshortened vertical perspective was of something really tall. I remember after that driving to New York on Route 80, and how on clear days you could see the Twin Towers from about forty miles away, just above the horizon. I remember the Channel 11 ads about the poor peon assigned to find a new symbol for New York's Channel 11 (WPIX) moping dejectedly in a waterfront park in New Jersey, not seeing the gigantic 11 behind him across the river, standing for the City itself and all its energy. And now that gigantic 11 has turned into the awful symbolism of the one-one in 9/11 ("two uprights and an upside down birthday cake with one candle," as Atta conveyed the date in a coded email).

I remember dinner in Windows on the World, a memory that I recall reading Frédéric Beigbeder's Windows on the World, just published in France, a novel about the last 118 minutes of the restaurant's existence. When we went there it was beautiful and dark, and we could hear the wind and feel -- or it felt as though we were feeling -- the tower sway just a little bit. Clouds would engulf the top of the tower, and then we could be on board ship, and sometimes we'd see bits of New York or New Jersey in the far distance, beyond the cloud that surrounded us or sometimes passed underneath us. The restaurant was quiet, and efficient, and calm, and pleasant because it was so clearly a place that no one came to regularly, and yet a place of great aplomb and self-confidence: what Tavern on the Green wanted to be, but wasn't quite (at least in my experience). It was a little like the intermission at the Met. They had a good wine cellar, there on the 107th floor. Beigbeder's book reproduces a color shot of the inside of the restaurant, empty, set-up, wine glasses, table cloths, linen, silverware, and the city outside the window on a beautiful day. It's very eerie because that view, that view point, is gone, but in the photo you see the view and the view-point. I remember the cheese course and also that I had some sort of fish in puff-pastry. It was a room, with carpeting, and table cloths, and glasses of water. What could be less harmful or less reprehenisible?

I remember that after the attacks two years ago, a Pakistani militant and Osama supporter was explaining why the militants would win: "The Americans love Pepsi-Cola. We love death." This was meant as an insult, obviously, but it seemed right when affirmed. Loving Pepsi was loving life. I do love Pepsi-Cola, and all sorts of other things. Part of this weblog is about the salutory, radiant incommensurability between Pepsi and death. What I remember on the whole is how Pepsi hits the spot, how I've got a lot to live, and Pepsi's got a lot to give -- that is that a lot of what I live, and what all the people murdered on September 11th had to live -- is on the order of Pepsi (or 7-Up, now owned I think by Pepsi: I like it. It likes me!). That's what I meant by my post on inconvenience a couple of weeks ago: the towers were these blank walls of glass, and not much seems wrong from the long perspective with knocking down blank walls of glass and killing some "not that great" number of people, as someone I know somewhat thougtlessly put it. But that's to forget everything that everyone remembered, the living and the dead, and all the memories that would now never be formed.

Beigbeder's book is a lot like Perec's W ou le souvenir d'enfance, and I suppose he's deeply influenced by Perec. It's about those moments that in Perec are on the pages that face disaster in his own memories. The book is in alternating chapters, as is Windows on the World, and what alternates is horror and apparent triviality. But the unfathomable sorrow of human loss goes with the sense that we are endless repositories of trivial objects which mark that endlessness. This is what makes for Perec's greatness as a writer: all that Pepsi and all the places he drank it.

posted by william 1:10 PM
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