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, April 14, 2009

I remember that I wasn't really puzzled by the fact that burglars didn't use fire escapes.

There were a lot of them in my grandmother's neighborhood in Washington Heights, but none in our neighborhood. It was like a different ecological region, with different flora: lower buildings, many with awnings, and most with fire escapes.

I assumed that using them really was cheating. I didn't even articulate this assumption to myself until I read a Batman comic where (as I recall) someone disguised as Batman was breaking into buildings. Batman figured out that he used his cape -- his counterfeit cape -- to lasso the bottom of the fire escape ladder and pull it down. That was when I first somehow realized that adults couldn't reach up to the ladder, and that it was held nearly horizontal by a counterweight (which I saw clearly depicted in the frame of the comic). I had just sort of assumed that they were fixed structures, like anything else.

The fact that they weren't made me obscurely sad: some trust went out of the background of the world. It wasn't perfectly still and stable, its use and status unanimously agreed to. It was designed to frustrate some people and to protect others. We weren't all at one about the world we lived in.

posted by william 2:11 PM
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