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

Tuesday, November 04, 2003

I remember people opening car doors to slam them tighter while we were driving. I have a general memory of this -- a practice that is much rarer now that lights and bells tell you that the door isn't shut. And I have a particular memory of my mother doing this, in the left back seat of the car as we drove up the West Side Highway. I was surprised at the incongruity of her opening the door as we were driving, and then of her slamming it. My parents told me never to do that, so I think I must have wanted to open my door as well. I didn't understand then that you could get killed falling out of a quickly moving car. I thought that all that counted was downwards velocity -- and besides in many TV shows people fell out of moving trains. But later Hugh Cramer told me -- in the context of admiring some hero who survives a fall or jump out of a car, or maybe some friend of his brother Ben's -- that fifty miles an hour was usually fatal.

I remember Hugh was also the source of information about the world's records for bicycle speeds: fifty miles an hour on a straightaway, and close to a hundred when drafting a train. He was also, as I pursue these associative memories, the source of information on land speed records on the salt flats. And my father told me why they used the salt flats instead of roads: because if you even hit a pebble at four hundred miles per hour you would flip and crash and burn. This seemed unlikely, though it did tell me something I couldn't have suspected about the salt flats: that they were perfectly debris-free and smooth. Later, when Paul Marsala taught me to shoot a rifle (see entry in archives for January 22, 2003), he said that a single blade of grass would deflect a high-velocity bullet. This was one of those cases where two intuitions clashed: that the momentum of the bullet would be hard to deflect; that the momentum of the bullet was so tightly wound, as it were, that the smallest perturbation would be catastrophic. (In Jack Finney's Time and Again, a book I inherited from the house my parents bought but didn't read for twenty years, the conflicting theories about the alterability of the past take the form of the same intuitive hunches.) At any rate, opening doors in moving cars seemed another one of those adult skills: they could do it, and they knew when it was necessary to do.

posted by william 10:40 AM
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