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

Tuesday, March 14, 2006

I remember the first time I saw a supermarket door that opened automatically, at the Co-op supermarket on 26th street which I was never quite sure I was allowed to shop at when my downtoan grandmother (who lived in the Co-ops there) sent me for milk. It was only the out-door that opened, and it opened when you stepped on a pressure sensitive pad, not when a motion detector sensed you. It didn't work half the time. Sometimes (especially when first Key Foods on 92nd and then the Garden / Daitch-Shopwell on 90th got them) my friends and I would have to stomp on the pressure pads to make the doors open.

Key Foods seemed in advance of the Garden because they had them first. But the Co-op market was shabby, so there the automatic door just seemed somehow already dilapidated even though it as the first one I'd ever seen. I felt a kind of low-level sense of being cheated. I was experiencing what I knew should have been unnecessary disappointment in the promise of the future: automatic doors already seemed unreliable and broken down technology, without ever being shiny and new.

I think Tommy Hoge had already told me about them, which fed into my disappointment, because this was all they turned out to be. Or maybe he told me about better versions of them after I'd already experienced the Co-op version, and that's why I was disappointed with my version of the experience.

posted by william 12:17 PM
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