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, August 12, 2006

I remember the pop-up buttons when you took the phone off the hook. I remember the first time I noticed them. I wasn't allowed to play with the phone at all, but either by playing with it, or by watching my parents, I saw those buttons, which I hated. It was like looking upon the phone in its nakedness.

They were supposed to be hidden. I was interested, when I was allowed to play with them, that they both went down when you pushed one of them. Also that you could press them below the level of their recesses. They still seemed strange to me, though -- vaguely malevolent in the paired but inscrutable way they came up when you lifted the phone. I remember them as beige and somewhat translucent, maybe more translucent if the phone was black.

I remember sometimes trying to make the phone look hung-up, by curling the cord under the bracket for the receiver so that if anyone -- a teacher say -- called it would be busy.

I remember -- once I was ok with the desk phones and their two buttons -- being a little bit unhappy with the Hoges' kitchen phone, wall-mounted, with the receiver hanging from a genuine metal hook, which it pulled down. That seemed to me like a Captain Hook hook, compared to the more elegant aesthetics of the desk phone. The desk phone, off the hook, looked like a self-effacing amputee; the wall phone like one with a particularly prominent prosthesis.

posted by william 9:35 AM
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