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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.
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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
Monday, December 30, 2002
I remember the kids who had bus passes. You put them in bus pass holders with two plastic windows. Hugh Cramer and I tried forging them. Mine were self-effacing, as unchallenging as possible, in light, #3 pencil. The color of the paper was never right. (They changed the colors of the pass every month.) Hugh's were bold and beautifully done in magic marker. They were very impressive and almost always worked. When they didn't he'd just run away. I think we started doing this after watching The Great Escape (or was it Stalag 17?) where they forged papers and printed them I think with shoe heels.
Sunday, December 22, 2002
I remember toilets. I remember that I was surprised, when at my mother's direction I emptied the aquarium to clean it (the snail didn't keep the algae down as it was supposed to) the toilet flushed, just as she said it would. I thought the flushing required some sort of motor or machinery, and was amazed that you could get a real satisfying flush just by pouring a large quantity of liquid into it. I liked our toilets, without separate reservoir, and hated toilets in people's houses in the country, those that made you wait to fill up the reservoir again. I remember that I thought toilets were magical when I was very small. I remember my uptown grandmother teaching me to pee in a toilet by first teaching me to pee in a cup (a yellow cup). After I learned to do that, she would hold it over the toilet when I peed, and then she held it in front of me and then moved it, and I was peeing in the toilet! As I say, I thought they way they made things disappear was magical, and one day I threw one of those big apples she had, and which I didn't want, into the toilet and flushed. To my horror it overflowed, and Norris the handyman had to come. I couldn't believe it couldn't handle the apple: after all I would have been able to (and was expected to). My grandmother was very upset with me. I don't remember learning to poop ("making a pfui," we called it, after the interjection, Pfui! Teifel!). I suppose it was after I learned to pee in the toilet.
I remember the cotton glass we put in the aquarium filter, and how it was always feeling as though it was almost cutting your skin.
Friday, December 20, 2002
I remember, with painfulness even now, that I conceived a sudden and absurd antipathy to Brian Seeman one day, or one week. I recognize it now -- I recognized it then -- as having some masochist component. I cherished the antipathy. What I remember wincing is the day that I saw him walking home from school in front of me, and I felt that I would just punch him in the back. So I did. He was surprised and hurt. Whatever impulse this answered to in me, I think that took care of it. I seem to recall that there was parental discussion about this, and that I apologized -- actually apologized sincerely. But I never owned up to why I punched him -- that is, for no rational reason -- but came up with some paltry dodge, for which I could apologize. I think we stayed friends after that. It was ultimately a big deal only for me.
Wednesday, December 18, 2002
I remember that after seeing Mary Poppins -- my first Julie Andrews movie -- I got the book (or maybe we had it), and I was shocked and disgusted by what I read. Not that Mary Poppins was actually elderly, but that when the children are hungry she breaks off one of her fingers and gives it to them to eat: it turns out to be toffee or treacle or some such. I couldn't believe it. I read no further.
Tuesday, December 17, 2002
I remember that when we sang Had Gadyah (about the kid killed by the cat (was it?) chased by the dog beaten by the stick burned by the fire, etc. etc.) I was always puzzled by the fact that the angel of death seemed to be on the kid's side, while God, who punishes the angel of death seems against the kid. (Each punishment constituted a flip-flop, the innocent and their champions alternating with the evil and vicious: good attacked by bad rebuked by good attacked by bad, etc.)
Sunday, December 15, 2002
I remember how loud the ticking of the clock was at my uptown grandmother's apartment. At least once I remember that it kept me up. I remember also the hiss of the steam from her radiator, which was a puzzling sound to me, but comforting somehow from the start. I remember that the fruit she served after dinner -- after desert -- was very different from the fruit we had downtown. The apples were larger and mealier, the grapes more globular and more sour, and with larger seeds. I naturally assumed this had something to do with her, part of the package, with its advantages and disadvantages, of the food she prepared. I remember how much I disliked fruit after desert, and how oddly alkaline (I would have called it dry) water tasted after fruit. Or her water, after her fruit: it seemed to me that her water was subtly different too, less rich and round. I suppose this was an artefact of the glasses we drank from and of the less inviting metal of her fixtures. I remember reading a novelization of Get Smart! on her couch once -- this would have been before I read the Nordoff and Hall Bounty trilogy, doubting that anything written could get me to laugh if I didn't want to. (I liked Get Smart! partly because my friend Marc Bilgray was an avid fan.) But I was wrong: the first paragraph had Maxwell Smart carefully looking right, then left to make sure his entrance into a building is unobserved, then falling flat on his face as he trips over a shoeshine boy. I think I learned from that book that when he enters the phone booth in the opening credits, he's not ducking but going down an elevator. No one believed me when I explained this. I remember his shoe-phone. Later, when I started reading John Ashbery intensively, I came upon a line, in "Fantasia on The Nut Brown Maid," I believe, in which the speaker asks, "And who am I, talking into my shoe," which I assumed referred to Maxwell Smart. Now I'm not so sure anymore.
Friday, December 13, 2002
I remember that when I misbehaved at school, my parents tried to impress it upon me that it "reflected on them." This seemed ridiculous to me, and still does.
Thursday, December 12, 2002
I remember jill johnston, the lower-case lesbian columnist for the Village Voice when I first started reading it. I liked her.
Wednesday, December 11, 2002
I remember Robert Burnett. He was the only kid taller than I was in my grade in elementary school. This meant he stood right behind me when we lined up in the morning. Somehow we got to talking about reading palms. He claimed he could read them, and he looked at the tip of my index finger and intoned, "You will die when you are thirty-six." This seemed laughably old at the time. I thought I knew how he did it -- I assumed he had counted the whorls of my finger-print. But no matter how I counted, I couldn't get them to come out as thirty-six. I realized the likely explanation was that he miscounted. When I started approaching thirty-six I remembered this prediction. He turned out to be wrong. But by how much?
Tuesday, December 10, 2002
I remember that when my uptown grandfather was demobilized at the end of the First World War, he had to walk three weeks -- from near Russia, I believe, back home to Vienna. I remember finding out that he fought for Austria against Italy, and being unhappy since I loved Italy so much. It was strange consolation to know that Austria and Italy were on the same side in the Second World War -- it was only much later that I found out that this was the wrong side, and that Austria and Italy were against him.
I remember being "mali," Yugoslav for: the little one. How did that change?
I remember noticing one day that I could understand Yugoslav. Not suddenly understanding it, but noticing that I could understand it even though it wasn't my language. That seemed vaguely mysterious: it was like my relation to my grandparents. Familiarity, family-arity, but yet something different and not quite essential to me. It, and they, belonged to a world I could explore, that would welcome my exploration, but not quite to the world that didn't need exploring: home and my own language.
Monday, December 09, 2002
I remember that when I got to first grade the strip of cursive letters (we were taught to say "cursive") above the blackboard -- white on a green field -- was followed by the numerals from 1 to 0. I couldn't understand why 0 followed 9, and spent a lot of time bothered by it, when I should have been paying attention.
I remember my father taking me in to register for first grade, probably about a week before school started. We walked up 89th street to P.S. 166. I was five. I had no idea what he was getting me in to.
Friday, December 06, 2002
I remember that at Congregation B'nai Jeshrun, the rabbi was named William Berkowitz. (He got into some kind of trouble later, which I think had to do with money, and he left the Congregation; he then went on the radio, though I never heard him. I liked his son who was about eight years older than I.) My father always pointed out to me that we had the same first name. So once when I was there for a Purim party or Hebrew School function, and he (unexpectedly) came into the room, in very high spirits I said to him (genuinely glad to see him), "Hi Billy! I'm Billy!" (He may have been the second William I knew besides myself, after Billy Douglas, of whom see the posting from 2/22/2002) This was the first time I would say that anyone looked at me askance. It didn't much bother me, but the next day my parents were very angry. He had called them up to deplore my insolence and rudeness (so, I now realize for the first time, he knew who I was: maybe just through my introducing myself). I was supposed to have said, "Hi, Willie." I was surprised that my parents believed this version of the story, since my father so insisted on our having the same name. I felt not at all guilty, but that various authority figures were just wrong, their judgments fallible. Berkowitz's for being so touchy, and reading a kind of default affectionateness as insolence; my parents for thinking that I'd be interested in saying "Hi, Willie" to someone I would have no incentive to address except that we had the same name. I explained what I'd done, and my parents sort of accepted it. It wasn't a big deal as far as my parents went (except fot being one of those displays of misjudgment that progressively lead to the child's independence: they'd been fooled and this started meaning I could fool them), but it was as far as my relation to Berkowitz and his ilk, grave public men who were of a kind of Wordsworthian littleness underneath. No doubt this was good for me, but it was also a great disappointment.
Wednesday, December 04, 2002
I remember that in third grade Hugh Cramer would come over for a date, or I'd go to his house. Later, when I was thirteen or so -- I remember because I had a lot of acne and that came around thirteen -- I was friends with Lem Hering, who asked me about the acne: he was a few years younger than I. We'd arrange to meet, and he'd say, "It's a date!" I found this intensely embarrassing, since it wasn't a date. I wasn't dating yet, but I knew what a date was, I watched The Dating Game, and I wasn't quite sure that I wanted to date. But if I did (although I don't remember being in love at the time, except no doubt with Michelle Mailliet, the Gilberte of my early adolescence, whom I saw six weeks a year in Bellagio), it certainly wasn't with Lem. But I couldn't tell him any of this. He was frank and open, and I knew that it was just wrong of me to be annoyed and embarrassed.
Monday, December 02, 2002
I remember that when my reading was obsessive, non-stop, utter absorbed, as an early teenager, my downtown grandfather told me he had been the same way as a youth. My grandparents' house had very few books, mostly Readers Digest condensed books, and a few books on bridge, and some Leon Uris. I think they had The Good Earth, the first book I read consciously because it had been written by a Nobel Prize winner. (I didn't finish it.) My grandmother read a lot -- I seem to remember that she read Judith Rossner's August -- but she picked up her books elsewhere, perhaps at her bridge club, perhaps at my parents' house, and had almost none at her house. So I was surprised to hear that my grandfather was such a passionate reader. He said that he remembered standing underneath the street lamps, in Sofia I think, when he was seventeen, late at night, because he couldn't stop reading. And he said that he had a "nervous breakdown," and from one day to the next found himself unable to read a single page. He said that he then went without reading for what? -- maybe fifty years -- until fairly recently when he'd begun to read again, but very little at a time. I worried that such a fate was in store for me too, but so far I am still able to read, though not as then. I seem to recall that someone fairly obvious, whom either I had read or hadn't, was his favorite author in his youth. Dumas? Balzac? I wish I could remember who it was, since I took his tastes very seriously. The picture of him reading so passionately all those years ago, and that time of life having been obliterated, had something of the same effect on me as (later) Andre Kertesz's great photography book On Reading which just shows people lost in their books and newspapers. We see them reading, but we don't see what they are reading, and all these figures absorbed in their own worlds seem oddly and completely inaccessible to me. They are in another world, but the photo can't show what the world is, since we can't read what they're reading, not even the titles, and so we see them but we can't reach them. They are far more distant than most people in photographs -- even dead people -- usually are. And my grandfather seemed distanced in the same way. I do wish I could remember whom they (my mother and grandmother) said was his favorite author. That would give me some access, perhaps.
Sunday, December 01, 2002
I remember my parents and some friends (the Herings?) taking us to look at the Christmas windows downtown. I didn't know about them at all. We went at night, with lots of other people. It was dark and snowy. I was surprised and delighted by how elaborate the windows were. The lines were worth it. It seemed festive and strange. The festivity seemed distant from me, just as Christmas itself was -- a Christian holiday that we didn't celebrate (though the Herings did). So it seemed somehow exactly right that we were out in the cold looking through glass at scenes in stores that were themselves closed. The scenes in the window were inaccessible. They belonged to a space that we couldn't get too: the space of Christmas itself. I remember always being disconcerted by seeing window dressers in windows. The windows were somehow supposed to be free of human presence. At night during the holiday season they always were.
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