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

Friday, March 01, 2002

I remember thinking that "idea" had an r at the end of it. Also that "I forget" was an odd formulation: I think that maybe my parents never said it. They did say "I forgot" about things which required correction. But "I forget" at first sounded to me like an odd action to be doing: the first person acquiescence in the imperative "forget it." Why would I forget if I wanted to remember? But people did say "I forget where we were supposed to meet." Yes, my parents would certainly have said "I forgot where...." I think I put these two memories together -- "idear" and "I forget" because I think both these realizations occured on 89th street between Broadway and Amsterdam: I said "idear" one day and someone mocked me, and then we had an argument about how the word was spelled; and someone said "I forget where..." which struck me equally with the notion that "idea" didn't end with r.

I remember three occasions of sheer self-forgetful fun. The first time I played Ring-a-lario instead of tag, in a new playground on my way home from school one day. What an amazing game: it was completely exhilarating and you could use everything in the playground and it was nonstop. Later in Henry Roth's Call it Sleep I read about stickball (which we also played, though we preferred stoop-ball, and as mentioned before handball) and Ring-a-levio. Roth's name for it just sounded wrong to me, though I since found it was standard, but then more recently and delightedly found in the Opies that "a-lario" has a very old English pedigree. So I feel the memory of the fun was thereby saved. Occasion 2: in Yugoslavia (that then was), a large pole, worn completely smooth and set out horizontally over some lake water (although this was very near to the Adriatic.) Older kids -- mythical teenagers -- were playing a sort of king-of-the-hill game on it. You sat at the end and people got wet so as to be able to skid down the pole extremely fast and try to knock you off. If they didn't do it at first you wrestled, until one or both fell in. Some of us younger kids got to play too. They'd earlier asked where I was from and I tried to convince them that I was Yugoslav, in my American accent and with my grammatical errors: I thought it was much cooler to be from Yugoslavia than from New York. (I always tried as well to convince people that I'd been born in Milan -- in "Milano" -- because I thought it would give me added cachet.) They refused to believe me, but the blissful game on the log made me forget all self-consciousness. And the third time was when soccer practice was cancelled in tenth grade because of a huge rain storm. So I hung out with three of the 12th graders and we just played in the rain and the mud, diving for the ball (three of us were goalies, and one a forward, and we loved diving and tackling) and got covered with enough mud to be extras in a realistic war movie. Time has never flown so quickly as it has those three times.

posted by william 2:15 PM
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