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, March 04, 2006

I remember that one of the times I rode my bike to school, along with Jon Coles and four or five other people -- including Peter Obstler? --, as we were riding past Grant's Tomb, north on Riverside Drive, one of them turned on the heat to pass someone else -- Jon? -- who'd just gotten ahead of him, and rode with really breakneck speed, awing us all. Except for one of us, maybe the person passed, who rode equably no-handed and just called out, "And I remain unimpressed. [beat] All I am is bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored." (I remember with that Bergsonian precision the number of boreds, remember it as a rhythm and as a beat, not as a figure, just as Bergson says.) The speed of his response matched the speed of the breakneck rider. It was a beautiful morning, fresh and warming, and a wonderful moment, riding to school with all that space around us, the greenery, the church just past, Riverside Drive one-way here as we passed Grant's Tomb counter-clockwise, the river coming up as we swung back uptown on the large trestled span just north of Grants Tomb, and the lovely relaxed quickness of the response, which simply had the effect of making all us by-standers (or by-riders) feel a simple part of a kind of genre scene: a group of cyclists riding to school one beautiful morning. Probably no one else who was there remembers this, and therefore no one else in the world does, so now it's a genre for me alone.

posted by william 8:22 AM
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