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

Monday, March 10, 2003

I remember that my friend Steve Lurie in junior high had juvenile diabetes. He couldn't eat cake, except when he was going into a diabetic coma, and then he could eat a lot of it. He had a bracelet. He was very interesting on the disease. He loved tennis and knew of a tennis champion with juvenile diabetes, but at the time I didn't know tennis-champions and so I didn't recognize the name and don't remember it. He was once mugged but showed the muggers his medical alert bracelet and convinced them that he was taboo or a contagious danger, and so they left him alone, which he thought was funny. I went to a birthday party for him on Fifth Avenue, on the East Side; I remember the awning, and how far down you had to walk from the 86th Street Crosstown bus to get to I think 937 Fifth -- how slowly the numbers descended (I must have been late), and that I liked his mother a great deal. She wasn't diabetic, just a mother. Steve I think couldn't eat the cake. He told me that he discovered that he had diabetes because his urine "stung." I thought this was odd. I think this was the first time I heard the word urine, though like Tom Wall on "stool" I immediately knew what it meant. I thought it was odd because I didn't tend to pee on my own hands, and so I didn't get how he happened to discover that his urine stung. Fearful innocence! The uretha was not a sensory surface for me back then. (Not I think till reading some gruesome accounts of masturbation with pins in Boys and Sex when I was thirteen.) I knew already at the time that he was very gallant.

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