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, May 21, 2005

I remember, barely, the cop on the beat whom I would see on West End and 90th, and who somehow reminded me of our doormen -- or maybe the doormen reminded me of cops. This was in the days of Officer Joe Bolton, and before the police started cruising in squad cars. I remember him as kind of over the hill, gangly, goggle-eyed (I think he wore glasses) Adams-appled, a little bit like Don Knotts, only more so. I remember the police call box on 90th and West End, and have a vague memory of another, beefier cop, calling in one day, talking into the lamppost, into the box at mouth height. At the time, lampposts had all sorts of gadgets on them -- fire alarms, call boxes, other electrical boxes, maybe junction boxes, maybe occasional small mail boxes.

posted by william 11:14 PM
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