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

Wednesday, December 02, 2009

I remember that if you picked up the extension to listen in (or eavesdrop) on an adult's conversation on a rotary phone while they were still dialing, the call would not go through. You had to try to time picking it up while the phone was ringing on the other end, ideally before the person being called answered, since it was always obvious if you picked up after the connection was made. I'd worm my finger under the handset, holding one of the still slightly scary pop-up plastic cylindrical buttons flush with the base of the cradle, wait a second or so after I heard the last number dialed in the other room (you could hear the clockwise dialing motion much better than the dial's return), and then slowly let the two buttons come up, as noiselessly as possible. (I'd sometimes do this on incoming calls as well, gently releasing the buttons while the person in the other room was picking up the handset which I trusted would make enough noise to cover what I was doing.)

I can't, of course, remember anything interesting that I heard during these conversations, but I always liked to listen to my mother talking to my father on the phone: the adult world was just like business in the movies, urgent but opaque and for me unreferential conversations about lots and lots of people and the various things they were attempting and thwarting which put the hum into city life, the buzz in the business of living.

posted by William 10:39 AM
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