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

Saturday, October 09, 2004

I remember that taxi meters -- ugly things that I put in the same category as thouse hydraulic door regulators -- had flags which the driver rotated downwards to start the meter. It was illegal to carry passengers flag-up. (I think I learned this from a human interest story in the Sports section: some player or coach or someone with savoir faire split the profit with the driver.) I didn't know how anyone could really see, until I learned that the sign on top of the cab went off if the flag was down, showing that it was taken. I never had the guts to ask the driver to take me off-book, but when Linda and I took a cab -- to Brew Burger! -- she just said to the driver: "Want a dollar?" and he said yes, just like that, and we got there for a dollar.

I remember another time in Brew Burger with Lou that at the next table a hippiesh guy was saying to his girlfriend, in depressed and demoralized tones, "We need to talk about out relationship." He kept using the term. I didn't know whether I thought it was ridiculous or cool. He belonged to that world, that free love world, where people had relationships. But he was so slow-motion and morose about it. She didn't say anything that I remember.

posted by william 8:02 AM
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