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

Thursday, February 14, 2002

I remember GRID. And HTLV.

I remember tiles -- in the lobby of the building I lived in till I was two, on 158th street; and in my grandmother's bathroom in the building next door, before she moved at the same time we did.

I remember lunatic fastidiousness. A pirate t-shirt I used to like until I noticed a small spot in the fabric that wouldn't come out. A plate where some imperfection in the enamel left a black rough mark on it. I would always make sure to avoid that plate in the cupboard. I once threw out some scrambled egg served to me on it, and couldn't eat scrambled egg after that for quite a while. This was a period when I thought I was surrounded by poison. The exterminator came one day with a pump a little like the bicycle air-pumps on my parents' bikes. I think this connection led to a horrendous fantasy I had at the time: I hated wet kisses (and was famous in my family for always wiping kisses) and this was because I thought evil aliens were hidden in the plastic bodies of my family and when they leaned forward to kiss me, inside the aliens had placed a poison pump to the lips of the plastic model and were pumping poison at me. If I wiped the kiss off I'd be ok though. This seemed like a sustained belief, but I don't see how it could have been: where did I go for comfort when I fell or got sick? But I thought all adults were like this, but the more affectionate, the more vividly. My friends I assumed were human though.

I remember how very itchy the very itchy beard I wore at a Purim party at Congregation Habonim (on 99th street?) was.

I remember that my grandmother (from 158th street) had a pyramidal gouge in her leg. I didn't ask anyone about it: it was a fact both uncomfortably specific and yet somehow eternal. I asked my mother about it only a year or so ago, eight years after my grandmother died. It was the result of a childhood accident: not a big deal, but I now see a big enough deal that my mother had asked her about it.

posted by william 2:00 PM
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