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, March 14, 2002

I remember a very early birthday – I might have been five? when my parents took me for a helicopter ride. All I remember is looking down and seeing the water of Sheepshead Bay enamalled in sunlight. I think this was the first time I flew.

I remember a slightly later birthday – except now I realize it couldn’t have been because it would have been in the summer – when my father took me up in a small plane in Stormville and we looked down at the patchwork quilt of lots and flew over the place we were renting. I thought I could see it, but probably not. I remember the plane was yellow. This was the first time I was in a plane. Later, for my twentieth birthday, Margot Tweedy took me sky-diving at the same airport: Greenhaven, near the prison.

I remember just before my fifth birthday having what is now known as my “Sparks dream.” I described it the next morning to my mother in the dining room at breakfast: she put her arm around my waste as I stood next to her seat and I told her that I saw my baby-head, as if from behind, in a crib, and that I saw scores (as I would now say) of candle flames without candles flickering in the dark space of the room all around me. She called them sparks, and it became my sparks dream. She predicted that I’d forget it by adulthood, and I bet I wouldn’t. I remember the dream, and not just remembering it. I win.

I remember that on the eve of my ninth birthday, at the Dollard’s apartment. They had an aquarium which I was sitting with my back to, when my father told me: “Tomorrow is your last one-numbered birthday.” I remember also a bit later telling my mother that I would count as a teenager when I hit – either ten or eleven, I’m not sure. And her vehement denial.

posted by william 4:27 PM
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