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

Monday, March 04, 2002

I remember aspirin crushed with sugar which my mother used to give me when I was sick. And how amazing her voice and her comforting was.

I remember when my sister was born. We were at my grandparents' house for Passover, just two blocks away from Columbia Presbyterian. My mother went into labor, and my father walked her over there and came back. Later we walked by the hospital to the 168th street stop, and took the A-train (the "superexpress" my father called it) downtown. I loved the A-train and standing in the first car at the front window watching the tracks. A week later when my mother and sister were due home, I put into practice the fantasy I'd anticipated: that I would come home (but from where? I was five and a half, and in kindergarten I guess. I remember that I would be allowed to go from the lobby to our second floor apartment alone. But how did I get to the lobby? Fred and Al, my favorite doormen, saw me safely inside -- that I remember. I used to take the stairs up, and then go to the front door, but this time, I thought I would come home) and go up the stairs to the back door (which led to the kitchen) and my new little sister, Caroline, would be standing there in a little red dress. So I rang the back door, and my mother answered it, slightly puzzled that I was coming in the back way, and then brought me to see Caroline in a white baby-suit and hat, sound asleep in her basinet, looking very very small. I didn't hear her till early the following morning: I was in the bathroom pooping and was shocked to hear her cry from the next room. Suddenly I felt very big -- a person who knew how to poop and who could be interrupted in this adult activity by this strange, unrecognizable call from the unfamiliar world of infancy. For the first time I didn't know who she was. (But this wasn't the first time I didn't know who I was -- that came long before.)

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