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

Wednesday, April 14, 2004

I remember walking down West End once, a block or so North of where I'd been doored (on the East side of the street) when a girl about my age smiled at me. I think I was smiling too, but either because that was my perpetual mask or because of something private. But she smiled back! And that was the first thing I noticed about her. It was a lovely moment. I remember in connection with that getting self-conscious about eye-contact on the street, and then reading somewhere that in the U.S. approaching pedestrians maintained eye-contact till they were about eight feet from each other, at which point they looked down. This was helpful when I got self-conscious, mainly because I was struck or attracted by the person approaching.

I also remember the opposite: getting involved in staring contests on the subway -- usually they were one-way. I'd read somewhere in a novel of someone who was frankly at ease with himself and didn't look away, and I liked getting strangers to look away first. Since they weren't even thinking that this was a staring contest, they usually did, although I think also that you're aware of a kind of timed and cued agreement to look away. One night, in the bus to Long Island (I don't remember why I was taking the bus out: my mother might have been there for the month, while my father was staying in the city) I got involved in a staring contest with a guy in his thirties. He wouldn't look away. He was very tough. He got angry. He rebuked me. But I was within my rights! I wouldn't look away, but he got scarier and scarier. Finally I did, and then he explained, with some vehemence, that challenging people like that was a very stupid thing to do. I don't think I did after that.

I remember another time going to the city from Long Island on the train and smoking. Once I got away from my parents I could smoke. On the platform I heard a guy yel, "Watch your cigarette, fuck!" I wondered what he was talking about. "Yeah, you, fuck!" He was yelling at me. Apparently I'd given a jaunty swing to my cigarette-holding arm and came too close to his child. These are morphing into memories of rebuke, but this one was different in kind. He wasn't being helpful to me. It wasn't to improve my behavior or the impression that I made on people, or my chances in life, that he was rebuking me. He was protecting his kid, and expressing his sheer hatred for me. And I was just a kid myself! This was the poisonous version of the first time a mother told her toddler not to "bother the man" -- meaning me.

posted by william 10:07 AM
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