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, 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.

posted by william 12:09 AM
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