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, July 31, 2002

I remember another time that was pure fun: a pillow fight my father had with Hugh Cramer and me in his bedroom. The feathers flew -- not quite as much as in the movies (is there one in The Sound of Music?). We were screaming and panting and it must have lasted nearly an hour. The two beds came unhooked and we were falling between them, and jumping up and down on them like trampolines, a practice that in general my father discouraged. (He had strange ideas that one could "break" the bed by doing this, where it was obvious to me that you couldn't. Now of course I realize that this is the difference between your sense of what your body can do to the world when it weighs sixty-five pounds and when you are an adult: your body feels more or less the same, but the world seems different.) But my pleasure in this was somewhat vitiated when Hugh, who always boasted about his father by deprecating others', said that his father taught him real wrestling moves. Physical fighting like that would have been inconceivable with my father. This was one rare case where I discounted what Hugh said about the superiority of his father. The ways that his father had seemed cool at least included: his tolerance for and indeed example to Hugh's atheism; his family's cussing all the time even in front of the kids (I learned my four-letter words from Hugh); his allowing Hugh to go to bed at 11:00 pm or later, when I was sent to bed at 8; his allowing Hugh and Ben to watch a lot more TV than I was allowed to; and -- I think this may have been first and most impressive -- his allowing Hugh to go out alone and to cross streets alone, when I still had to hold hands crossing streets. Hugh also taught me about bowling -- we went to the bowling alley on 72nd Street -- and once for my birthday I got my father to take Hugh and me and some other friends there. But after I had burned with anticipation, it turner out that because it was a week night, there was league bowling, and no lanes available, none of which either of us had anticipated. Hugh said that hisfather wouldn't have made this mistake, and that he was surprised that my father hadn't made a reservation. I'd wanted to show Hugh that my father knew about bowling and such as well. My father offered to make it up to me by taking us on a weekend. I don't know whether he ever did or not: somehow that didn't matter.

posted by william 7:26 AM
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