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, September 17, 2007

I remember being stuck in elevators. The new elevator in our building, with its office-building feel, had no window. The old one had a round porthole that looked very old-fashioned (my uptown grandmother's also had a round porthole but my downtown grandmother's, in the new buildings in Chelsea, were windowless.) But in both elevators being stuck between floors felt like being in limbo. For some reason the new elevator also had a stop button that you pulled out. I vaguely imagined this would save you if the cable broke. The alarm on the new one was a regular button. On the old one it was a particular button different from the elevator buttons which stood out from the wall and which you depressed till they touched the panel.

Anyhow, I got stuck at least once in the old one (and pressed the alarm button first once or twice and then repeatedly -- it was then I learned that the doorman (Al) heard the alarm from the elevator and not through some system which lit up the switchboard or the like. In the new one I got stuck with some adults -- two older women as I recall and a young adult man. He forced the door open between floors and climbed up and out.

Although I knew from service elevators with their grills and also from European lifts what the floor looked like at shoulder height, it was very strange to see the opaque door forced open and to find that we were actually in a physical place, between floors -- strange since I thought of floors as self-contained and separate regions which you could take stairs to, of course, but which elevators linked only by going from one to the other without any spatial transition. Motion and time, but not space, were the mode of transition. Even in the grill elevators at Congregation B'nai Jeshurun, the blankness of the wall between floors made it seem that we weren't actually moving through space. But now this guy was climbing up and out. Someone else in the elevator -- maybe one of the older women, maybe another kid -- said this was dangerous, and I intuited why. But the most surprising thing was that you could force open an elevator door between floors.

posted by william 11:00 PM
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