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, May 22, 2002

I remember my car seat. I don't think I had it long, and the reason I had it was to stop me from squirming or jumping around in the car, not safety. If anything it was probably marginally more dangerous than not. It had its own steering wheel and signal levers. I would imitate my parents and my uprown grandfather in constantly adjusting the wheel. I remember I had no idea why they did this -- the car would seem to be going straight down a straight road, and they were constantly twitching the wheel back and forth. This seemed useless to me, but it made the toy steering wheel more fun.

I remember trying to count to a million, many times. On a long trip one day my uptown grandmother told me it would take eleven days and nights to do (which is a roughly accurate approximation of the number of seconds in that period: I wonder how she knew or heard that, since certainly she wouldn't have done the calculation). I did get up to a thousand on that trip before I got bored. I remember some Isaac Asimov book saying that we were given roughly two billion heartbeats as a birthright, and that if we took care of ourselves and didn't smoke we could hope for another billion. I wonder whether this was Fantastic Voyage.

I remember always being surprised when it was morning, because I never managed to catch myself falling asleep. This has changed, and I think it means that when I was very young I really would fall asleep from one second to the next, which is the way I thought it worked anyhow. Of course I remember being half-asleep, as the adults called it, but that was a different state from what I ever remember experiencing lying wide awake in bed waiting for sleep to come. Somehow I got it into my head that you lay awake for an hour and then fell asleep, but I think I probably just lay awake for a few minutes or so.

I remember that I could never get a compass to form a perfect circle. This was because the pencil grip never held tightly enough. If you pushed down enough to get the pencil to make a continuous mark, it would always slip upwards by the time you got all the way around. Probably even if it didn't slip the circle wouldn't have been perfect because of the graphite wearing away as it drew. But it would have been close enough.

I remember being very impressed by my parents' answer to how the first straight edge was made. I'd asked how rulers were made, and they said with other rulers, and I asked, well how about the first, and they said, with only a very short pause for thinking, "with string." And I understood immediately: it was I think the first moment that I can remember of intellectual revelation.

posted by william 6:51 AM
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