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

Sunday, December 19, 2004

I remember the emergency pull-off bays on the West Side highway, on the west side of the road, between the highway and the river, which we always passed late at night, going home, downtown, from my uptown grandmother's or even north of that. I didn't know what they were. The didn't have the Emergency Stopping Only signs to be seen now. They were just these neat half-moons that could fit a car or two if they were angled, and reminded me of the semi-circular arches in my wooden blocks set -- the kind that hollowed out a regular sized oblong block, and that I think were supposed to be catenary and that I think weren't. It was as though these parking spots were flattened blocks on their sides. And sometimes there would be cars parked there, on hot summer nights, between the highway and the river. I was always curious about them, and about the credentials and expertise that entitled some cars to stop there. They seemed glamorous, full of know-how, part of that other life I would know as an adult but didn't yet and didn't have any explanations for. It's not that I knew that people were kissing there, or having sex; I didn't. But I knew that something was knowable that I didn't know, and it was purely glamorous, and had to do with the general world of the city and not with my own particular world.

posted by william 10:42 PM
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