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

Friday, August 15, 2003

I remember hearing the term blackout in our dining room, overlooking the courtyard of our building, when I got home, or maybe the next day, after the 1965 blackout. I think of that room now as where I heard about most of the public issues that I did hear about at home. Remembering my post from August 7 about that room as it appeared on the Super-8 film my father used when I was very young, it's hard to think of it also as the room that felt slightly tinged with the tawdriness of the world, as it was with the darkness of the courtyard, when I was older. It might well be that out talk about the blackout was my first initiation into the talk about the public world in that room, since it interested me as much as anyone else.

I remember in the 1965 blackout my mother being very glad to see me, when I got home, though to me it was not a big deal. I remember talking to Hugh Cramer about it the blackout the next day.

I remember posting, on March 5, 2002, this account of the 1965 blackout:

I remember the first black-out. I was standing on my head (in an exercise class in the Hotel Breton Hall on 86th and Broadway -- this was, and still is, a residential hotel populated by performing artists who valued its thick walls; we did exercise to music pounded out on a loud piano. Sometimes I waited for my mother in the dark musty dining-room while she did her class. There was also a changing room with a bathroom behind it, also dark. I'd sometimes get water in the bathroom filling a musty old glass from a musty spigot. I didn't like all this mustiness, but it was somehow all right as well because the smells were not unlike the smells in my Haven Avenue grandparents' house. Or maybe I did mind, because the glass for the water and the mustiness of the smell were associated for me with my grandparents' false teeth sitting in their wide-mouthed water-glasses all night long. I also remember that my grandmother would keep a glass of water by her bed and that it would slowly aerate over the course of the night and be full of bubbles by morning. All of this was unlike the brisk cleanliness of my house.) I was standing on my head and I could see the light fading out and then coming back. This was puzzling -- not something you could really judge standing on your head. I stood up and the light lasted a minute or two more and then went out for good. It wasn't quite dark yet, but I was sent straight home: I remember headlights and the unilluminated stop-lights, and being struck by the fact that the blackout wasn't universal: some lights worked, just not the power-grid. The next day people were amazed that everything had worked so smoothly -- no looting or anything. I didn't know what they meant: why should there be anything different just because it was dark? I think this shows my great confidence in my world back then, when my world was basically a neighborhood in New York City.

posted by william 7:54 AM
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