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, March 06, 2002

I remember Phil's Pizzeria on 94th and Broadway. I went there with my father -- sometimes we all went -- and we sat on short revolving stools and ate greasy pizza on wax-paper and drank purple grape juice in conical cups put into cylindrical holders so it looked like you had more than you did. At some point, the conical cups went from paper to plastic. When they were paper, it was hard to get the last drop out of the bottom; when plastic the surface tension kept drops stuck on the sides. So you got frustrated and always had to have more. But the pizza was ample. The tables at Phil's were the style of the time, formica with a thick milled or rippled edge, maybe two inches thick. We had a table like that in our kitchen at home: good to look at when you were upset. My Chelsea grandparents had one too, but ours was beige with a kind of greenish siding: my grandparents' strikes me as having been yellow. My Washington Heights grandparents had a larger wooden table.

I remember hearing there, at that table, from my grandmother about my uncle's death in the Second World War. (I am named after him.) She told me he'd been "killed in action," and I somehow already knew the phrase "missing in action," but I didn't know what "in action" meant (except that it had something to do with GI Joe since the GI Joe dolls were action figures). So I thought that maybe in actionmeant a way of being missing, and that if he was killed in action he was only presumed dead (I knew about being declared dead from a George Reeves Superman episode that I'd seen in which the criminal disappears in a kind of fortress-tomb for seven years in order to get himself declared dead so that he can galivant around scot-free when he emerges). So I told her that I hoped he might turn up. But she said no: he'd been the only person killed in this campaign on a Pacific Island. They'd been short of ammunition, and the GI next to him had asked him for some. To get it out of his pocket he'd had to stand up, and then he was shot in the chest. I recognized that difficult aspect of clothing, and it seemed strange that something which I thought only bothered kids -- that getting stuff out of your pocket when you were prone was a pain -- should have led to his death. It again somehow made for a continuity between me and the adult world. She then told me about the holocaust, and the death of her family in the camps. This was the first I heard about it -- it was interesting and distasteful. Later I found out that my father was very upset that she'd told me all this, but he was much more upset than I was.

I remember that George Reeves was a suicide. Hugh Cramer told me that George Reeves went crazy and thought he could fly. He jumped off a high building and started falling. He grabbed some wires -- Hugh had a sure narrative sense -- and they held for a moment and then broke, and he died.

I remember Kurt (?) Wallenda falling to his death off the high wire in Puerto Rico between two hotels. He tried to kneel down when a gust of wind blew up, but somehow his balancing pole knocked him off. I think he was 73.

posted by william 2:24 PM
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