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

Saturday, June 08, 2002

I remember that we used to put pads on the dining room table before covering it with a table cloth to set it at meals. The pads were a sort of brown leather on top, with a cloth padding and green pool-table felt on the bottom. They hooked together with a sort of latch that went between two plies of the padding. They protected the table from spills. When guests came we didn't use them. They made it a little hard to do drawing or tracing on the table, because the sharp pencil (or compass point) would poke through the paper.

I remember also that my parents' twin beds had a hook and eye underneath that you hooked after making the beds to hold them together. I remember that my bed had three wooden slats, cut on a bias so that they looked like railroad ties laid diagonally, on which my matress lay. We would take the matress off and then take the wood out and fence with it or use the bedframe as a fort. I'd also dive (like Superman) off the counters (with the sizzler burn on it) on to the mattress, counting on the slats to hold me up.

I remember my "Impeach Nixon" bumber sticker, on my bookshelf already in 1969. Who knew that it would come true? But who knew he'd be re-elected?

I remember my "Play Soccer!" and "New York Cosmos" bumper stickers. There were on the car.

I remember my desk chair, bent metal and yellow foam rubber, and my individual experience of the generic memory of reading the label which said "Not to be removed under penalty of law except by consumer." I removed it and felt anxious. I think everyone has this memory because we all find these labels before we learn what the word consumermeans. It just seemed part of the general legal aura. It seemed weird that one wasn't allowed to remove the label, but no weirder than a lot of things. I certainly didn't confess it to anyone. Much later -- muchlater -- I learned with an odd kind of relief that what I'd done wasn't illegal. As though the chair had been a ticking time bomb of possible evidence until then.

posted by william 1:39 PM
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