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

Tuesday, May 28, 2002

I remember pneumatic drills -- I couldn't believe how loud they were. It seems to me they're not quite so loud today, maybe because of noise ordinances? They were drilling on the street outside our class at P.S. 166, and you couldn't hear a thing in class.

I remember carbon paper, and onion-skin.

I remember mimeographs.

I remember (sound again) the sort of reverse pow-wow I would do during morning assembly in P.S. 166. We would meet by class in the lobby, and line up by height. It got louder and louder as we stood in line, and sometimes I would put my palms over my ears and open and shut them to hear the hubub pulse. When it got loud enough, Mrs. Eben, the school principal, would come in and blow her whistle, and we'd fall dead silent: we were all terrified of her. I don't think I was ever sent to see her, but I do remember being sent to the principal's office. Maybe I saw the assistant principal, who was much nicer? Mrs. Eben announced Kennedy's assassination to us, over the school loudspeaker. It was near the end of the day, a Friday, and I was already in my coat, but we were at our desks still, making Thanksgiving decorations for the party we were to have the next week. I was coloring in a feather on the cream construction paper. She made the announcement, and we all didn't quite know what to do. I think our teacher, Mrs. Comiskey that would have been, told us this was shocking and serious, or maybe Mrs. Eben had already asked for a moment of silence or of prayer. (At some point, there definitely was a moment of prayer, and I said the Shema -- I had no idea what else you were supposed to do. I still don't.) Then we just sat there, and I went back to coloring my feather. Monday they cancelled school, and we watched the funeral and John John saluting the caisson. I think I didn't know the song yet about the caissons keep rolling along, since I remember this is when I learned the word "caisson." But I wasn't very good about the words of songs, especially of choruses, or about seeing that they were the same words that we might use in other contexts. On Friday, after we went home, my mother asked me whether I still wanted to go to the Museum of Natural History, where she had promised to take me to see the dinosaurs. I had been reading Danny and the Dinosaur and I really wanted to see them now. I said I still wanted to go. It was nearly empty: I remember that in the dinosaur room there was a young couple (in their teens or twenties I'd say) and a guard. I was struck by how empty it was, and I think I wondered what theywere doing there. I was disappointed by the dinosaurs because they were just skeletons, not the dinosaur that you saw in Danny and the Dinosaur which was more a taxidermy model come to life. They told me I think the next week that Mrs. Eben was weeping when she announced the assassination, although I don't recall this or noticing it. We had an assembly in the auditorium when we got back to school, and I do remember how subdued she seemed then. I remember Johnson's first speech on the radio, and being impressed that he could lead the country so quickly -- he seemed so much more authoritative than the assistant principal (Mrs. Nadler!) ever seemed when she took over just because Mrs. Eben was out. But that hierarchical principle still kicked in, and we all thought the vice-president was no match for Kennedy himself, the greatest of all presidents ever, as we assured ourselves for a long time. We felt both sorry for Jonathan Richmond and in awe of him since he knew Kennedy's inaugural address by heart (see an earlier entry); it was as though he was the great surviving member of that time, and as though Kennedy's passion could now survive subjectively only in his memory. His recitation skills were much in demand for the next little while.

posted by william 7:06 AM
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