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

Monday, May 02, 2005

I remember that public bathrooms in New York City playgrounds were called comfort stations. I liked the name -- somehow it reminded me of my downtown grandmother. (Or maybe that's because there were comfort stations on the grounds of the Union cooperative housing development where she lived in Chelsea. I seem to recall them, and recall very well the masonry lattice work of the wall separating the grounds from the truck driveway between them and the Cooperative supermarket where she shopped, where they had Cooperative Milk and cheese and such like.) I knew immediately what comforst stations were, and I liked the idea that they provided comfort -- that you could comfort yourself by peeing ot that it was a comfort to know that they were there, or that the grand and gigantic city of New York was offering to comfort you. They're still called comfort stations in New York, but I don't know whether they have that name anywhere else. I don't think the subway bathrooms had that name; at any rate I remember that the bathrooms in the 96th street station were always closed.

posted by william 9:06 AM
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