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

Tuesday, April 22, 2003

I remember that some kids -- all boys I think -- had watches, which they'd show off. I associate this with my fifth grade class-room -- Mrs. Brenner's class. Watches then all seemed to have metal bands, and I was interested in how they worked -- the stretch bands especially, as opposed to the braced clasps (there must be some technical name for that). The villain in From Russia With Love had his garrot hidden in the winding stem of a watch with such a band. The boys with their watches had a much better idea of what time it was during the school day than the rest of us did. They knew how much time was left, and when it was getting close to the end of whatever boring thing we were doing. I guess there weren't any clocks in the classroom.

I remember that I did have a watch in junior high. I would notice the sections of the hour as class wore on, and especially that last five-minute region. I also remember being mugged on my way home from school once, by older kids -- teenagers (which didn't seem right to me) -- and how they asked whether I had a watch (after they'd taken my money), and when I said no pulled back my right sleeve, which was watchless -- the watch was on left wrist. I was glad that they weren't as infallible as they seemed, not only because it spared me a blow: it was one thing that I had over them, seeing the mistake they didn't know they were making. I think it was during this mugging that a police car drove by. We all stopped what we were doing -- they stopped mugging me, I stopped being mugged -- and waited for the police car to pass. (They were the ones who'd noticed it first, and put the whole thing on hold.) Then they finished up. The next day, I think, I saw them again, and complained about them to an older woman who knew them -- maybe someone's youngish grandmother. She accosted them and demanded to know whether they'd mugged me, but -- to my astonishment -- they utterly denied it. She couldn't do anything about it, and she didn't even express much displeasure, just a kind of bureaucratic helplessness. So that was something they had over me: their ability to fool an authority even when they'd been caught, or to be utterly immune to the authority's knowledge of their guilt.

posted by william 5:06 PM
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