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, November 14, 2003

I remember when automatic doors came in at the supermarket. They were only for exiting at first. I think Key Foods on 92nd Street had them before the Garden Market on 90th. The door opened when your weight on a padded platform in front of it signalled that you were heading towards it. This was before the current radar technology. It was fun to straddle the platform and go right up to the door without its opening (annoying, almost always, the people behind you waiting to go through). We'd also hold ourselves up on the hand railing that actually acted as a kind of guide to direct people directly to the door. I think we would engage in this apparently pointless activity just as a way of psyching the door out -- understanding its mechanism in a way that it couldn't understand out behavior. We could be invisible to it, and the reason we could is that its workings were so transparent to us.

posted by william 12:13 AM
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