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, April 10, 2002

I remember Expo 67.

I remember the World's Fair in Queens, which was not an Expo. Our class went, and I also went with my downtown grandfather. I remember the picture phones that were supposed to be the wave of the future. We had discussions in class about how we felt about them: would we want to answer the phone just out of the shower, or in our pajamas? But ATT assured us they were coming. I remember also a lot of formica, and some train ride through the future, as it was conceived then.

I remember that when I went with my grandfather I had a little toy magnifying glass, from a Crackerjack box. My grandfather showed me how to focus the sun's beams on the back of my hand, and suddenly there was pain. I was startled and a little hurt, but I think more interested than hurt. But I couldn't do it again (of course): burnt child shuns fire, or in this case the sun.

I remember the total eclipse that occurred when I was about eight or so -- we saw it in Stormville. They predicted that there wouldn't be another one until the strange science-fiction 90's or so. There were dire warnings about blindness, and I decided I would stay inside when it occured at about 4 pm. My mother acquiesced but my father pooh-poohed the idea. Then at 4 or so I climbed to the top of the hill where all the grown-ups were looking at the sky and I saw the crescent moon. "Hey, it's the moon!" I said, and my father rushed to me and got me to look away: of course it was the sun almost totally blotted out by the full moon. For the next few hours I kept convincing myself that my one-second exposure had blinded me, but of course it hadn't.

I remember the first, futuristic remote controls for TV's. They worked by sound (though I think at a higher frequency than you could hear), so that occasional loud sounds like caps or clapping or books falling could change the channel or turn the TV on or off.

I remember when cars had only AM radios, and they would fade out briefly when you went under a bridge.

posted by william 2:58 PM
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