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, October 28, 2008

I remember Tommy H pointing out a very high stain on the wall of the 90th street building that housed the Garden Market (or Daitch Shopwell by then), dribbling down. It was probably (twelve year old) head height, and we couldn't imagine the dog that had peed there. It had to be a Great Dane, but how tall could it have been? It was hilarious -- Tommy's hilarity was infectious and every time I saw it I loved thinking about the dog that could have done it. There was a Great Dane in our neighborhood, though it tended to be a feature of the street one block west of the market, between West End and Riverside. And it wasn't tall enough, though we imagined it kind of leaning to the side so as to point upwards as it went.

I remember how the dogs that people walked were part of the geography of the neighborhood -- a dynamic geography, since you'd see them at certain times of day. We didn't recognize the people we didn't know -- didn't know anyone to nod to -- but we recognized the dogs on their daily rounds, their nondescript owners in tow. I remember that Dr. C, a psychologist who had a German Shepherd named Cleo, always held a pair of pressed, aligned suede gloves in his leash hand. It made him look dapper as he walked his dog.

posted by william 11:42 AM
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