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 06, 2009

I remember Beckwith's bike repair...what? Not a shop, at all, more a junkyard really, with a dilapidated barn and some shacks. Beckwith himself was an old and shambling man in overalls and covered with grease, the perfect and perfectly Dickensian spirit of the place. It was impossible to imagine him on a bike; just as it was impossible to imagine Beckwith's bike repair at the end of this gracious lane in Quogue, New York. But he could just sort of grab a bike in his large and awkward hands and hand it back to you fixed. I was surprised that he wanted money for his repairs, though: it didn't look like he ever had any need or occasion to participate in its circulation.

I remember as well -- for a minute I conflated the two memories -- buying a used bike with my father in Ithaca, New York, the summer I spent there between junior and senior years in high school. It was completely destroyed by the end of the summer, and I wanted to abandon it where it was chained to some sign-post downtown. (I'd gotten a flat and fallen and twisted the frame; I remember actually going to a doctor about the contusions I had, also downtown, and he warned me about my posture.) But on the phone the day before we left my father told me to sell it back, and I did get $10 for it, which surprised me: it was $10 more than I thought I'd get. Jonathan D's father Jack picked us up (my parents had driven us, and we'd listened to John Dean's testimony on the radio), and we drove behind a motorcycle for a while, which made Jack D. very unhappy.

posted by William 3:32 PM
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