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, May 12, 2013

I remember the optician's hot sand - the way they'd dip your glasses into it in order to make them pliable for fitting. I had a vague but real background sense that this was just wonderful, that the kinds of things we played with in the sandbox were part of the real, adult world of technology or at least of the way it arranged and adjusted its objects. And what was great about it was that the sand was hot.

Like everything else it the city, sand was a natural resource brought from elsewhere, and the way it was used for important things, for real things in the well-ordered adult world involved keeping it at a high temperature, just like hot water. Hot sand and hot water were available, and a lovely thing to contrast with the cold drizzle and the sand in the sandbox it made just as cold available in our world.

I say "our" but it was more like "mine." Because if I think of a sandbox now, of the Platonic form of the sandbox as instantiated in Riverside Park on 92nd street, at street level (unlike the two sandboxes in the playground which were somehow less interesting, because of all the other things there I guess: slides, monkey bars, swings) -- if I think of that elemental sandbox now, to think of it platonically I have to think of it as empty and lonely, in no way associated with other children, and if I think of it as empty it's thinking of the way it looks as we pass it in the car as my grandfather drives me uptown to my grandmother's house, so its background in my memory is dark, as though cold and about to rain, if not already drizzling, and I see it across the street and under the lowering trees of the park, only through glass from the back seat, through the glass of the car window and also of my well-fitting glasses.

posted by William 8:33 AM
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