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, February 27, 2002

I remember clip-on ties. There were two kinds -- the ones like the rented bow ties you now get, that went all around the neck, and the ones that you just clipped to your collar. When I had my school picture taken in fourth grade I had to wear one.

I remember my father teaching me how to tie a tie. I could never master the Windsor knot. (Later I read an Ian Fleming James Bond in which the villain's penchant for Windsor knots -- Bloefeld's? -- is taken to show that he's homosexual; Goldfinger I remember is characterized by Bond's briefers as having semitic earlobes. I always wanted to apply the Windsor knot-indicator to President Reagan's similar penchant.) I remember also the intense frustration of having my father tie my tie, from behind. We stood at the mirror, since he could only tie a tie in a mirror, and his fumbling at my tie, getting the lengths wrong, etc., I found tormenting to a lunatic degree.

I remember plastic collar inserts. They were always in my father's and his father's change tray, as part of the paraphrenalia of adulthood: an inch and a half long, off-white, tapered at one end. I didn't know what they were and wasn't curious. Later I used them myself, and kept forgetting to remove them when I put my shirts in the laundry.

I remember my mother's stockings (of course). And my grandmothers'. (Including the fact that they might cover up that gouge on my downtown grandmother's leg.)

I remember, with far more surprise, my father's garters, which he put on to keep up his dress socks and which seemed to me one of the terrible things you'd have to do as an adult. He would sometimes wear a tuxedo as well (for the opera or a wedding), and those garters seemed to me like wearing a tuxedo every day.

posted by william 3:21 PM
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