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

Sunday, May 12, 2002

I remember Neopenephrine. I remember the bracing and almost bitter smell of it. It cleared your nose if you had a bad cold. I think it was eventually outlawed because of dangerous side-effects. I remember the little almost circular-disk plastic bottles it came in, and the feel of the plastic in my nose and then inhaling deeply. I'd seen my parents use it before I ever did, so I felt somehow adult the first time they gave it to me. After that it seemed like one of those odd indignities that children are made to undergo, since I think I vaguely preferred a stuffed nose to the experience of the nasal spray. But it also seemed like one of those indiginites getting over which actually made you more adult, so I was more ambivalent than opposed to it.

I remember the Time/Life series of science text books that my mother subscribed to. I particularly remember the math book, though I liked the book on machines and the one on biology as well. In the math book there was a lot of stuff on topology, and I remember the deformed coffee-cup/donut taurus, and also a wonderful series of photos of a man taking off his vest without taking off the jacket over it. This showed that in some topological way the vest could never be said to be under the jacket. I wasn't supposed to wear underpants under my pajama bottoms, so in imitation of the man in the book I used to take off my underpants afterputting on my pj bottoms, by stretching them down under the cuffs and over my feet. I remember also the photo of the back of a red-headed boy's head, with a whorl where you could see his scalp. Topology showed that there would always be one such point, and apparently by analogy that there would always be at least one point on the globe where the air was calm, no matter how windy the rest of the globe was. In the biology book I remember reading about reflexes, and seeing a photo of a pianist playing too fast for the playing to be governed by his brain alone: it required conditioned reflexes, and they'd drawn bright lines of neural interaction over a silhouette of the pianist. This actually may have been in the Mind volume which also had a series of paintings of a cat by a man becoming progressively more paranoid-schizophrenic. The cat looked more and more psychedelic as his malady increased. I think this volume may also have had the famous photos of a boy and a cat (?) switching sizes in a room that we read as rectangular though of course it wasn't. I tried making a shoebox sized version with a pinhole eye-sight for science fair but it didn't work.

I remember my chemistry set.

I remember home science experiments, one of which was about making a pinhole telescope out of the wooden spool from some thread. You somehow enlarged one end which I remember doing with a knife (I also remember how ugly pencils sharpened with a knife and not a pencil sharpener were; my downtown grandfather would use a knife; on the other hand he could cut paper perfectly with a table edge. I remember onion paper. And later: Corrasable Bond!) and the result was something that was basically a tool for squinting. I remember the experience of hollowing out the spool: scraping and testing and scraping and testing -- it went very slowly, but the spool did seem to become smoother -- less edged.

I remember being puzzled by the edges of things held up to my window: blue on one edge, red on the other. I was a little disturbed by this, but not very.

posted by william 11:02 PM
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