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

Sunday, December 20, 2009

I remember that my downtown grandparents had a couple of things in their house that we didn't, in addition to the wonderful balcony overlooking Chelsea. They had a small and elegant manual typewriter, with its double red and black ribbon. I was interested in how the keys got stuck, and also in my grandfather's expertise at shifting from small to capital and also from black to red.

The red strip was below the black, so that when you shifted to red the whole ribbon went up a quarter of an inch or so in its metal guide. Sometimes the black part of the ribbon would go up a little too high and flop or crease over the pointers of the guide, and then when you tried to shift back to black it would get stuck. But my grandfather was very good at getting it running smoothly again, and also at changing the ribbons when they were no longer usable.

That was a judgment call, since when you got to the end of a ribbon it just switched directions and went backwards, each long pass (the ribbons were many yard long so each pass produced yards of type) slightly less dark than the pass before. As with my parents' inked stamp pad (and the ink they kept to refresh it but which I wasn't allowed to touch) the difference from the nth to the n + 1th use was imperceptible enough that I always wondered how or why you'd know it was time to change it. (Later I felt that way about changing razor blades and toothbrushes. Sometimes, when I was older, the thing that determined me to change a ribbon was the fact that the ribbon I'd earlier discarded was now obviously darker than the ribbon I was still using, so I'd reuse the old one.)

One thing that would help make you realize that a ribbon was getting defunct was when the type was light enough to induce you to switch to the red half, which of course was used an order of magnitude or two less often than the black. I liked typing in red, and my grandparents seemed to as well, but even so it always lasted much longer. When the red faded, it really was time to switch. My grandfather was really good at that too, whereas I would never even try to do it. My grandfather would always show me how his fingers were free of ink -- he was always campaigning to make me learn his fastidious habits and techniques.

They had a drawer full of ribbons. One day I noticed that they were all black -- the bicolored ribbons were gone! This seemed very modern to me, as though they'd joined me in the jet age.

posted by William 10:17 AM
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