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, September 14, 2003

I remember one of the first things I remember about Michelle and Daniella. They would jump from the top of the diving platform on the raft in Lake Como and shout "Via!" as they jumped off, a kind of Italian "Geronimo!" (the shout I think I learned from my friend Comrade or Conrad, the "whatyamacallit" guy). Daniella always held her nose. Michelle could dive, beautifully, like her older brothers. She and Daniella were so full of life and self-assurance! I could never get myself to shout it. But I loved hearing them do it. When I started taking Latin in sixth grade, I learned that "via" meant "way" or "street," which I couldn't quite figure (nor why Latin should really be so different from Italian; I thought it was going to be such an easy language to learn). The platform was head-high, green, and next to a lower one, waste high, on the edge of the raft. The raft was held up by mossy metal barrels, that were yucchy to touch. But we'd sometimes dive under them and surface under the raft and spy on those outside its perimeter. Michelle and Daniella liked to try to pull my bathing suit down, but I was just barely too young to be happy about this; partly also because it was more Daniella than Michelle who would do it. I think this explains the remoteness to me now of those vivid cries: my aim in being in love with Michelle was not yet quite sexual, and the playfully frank sexuality of these "jeune filles au bord du lac," and which provided some of the energy of those via!s, was not something that my memory could quite fix on and therefore fix at the time. (It was on the plane back that summer that I read the masturbation scene in the novel about the Walter-Mittyesque spy who watches his guard masturbate and uses this knowledge to put intense psychological pressure on the guard. That was the first I knew about masturbation.) Daniella used to go around topless -- her breasts hadn't developed at all yet -- but Michelle never did, and that was certainly a difference that I knew and that mattered to me, and that I regretted, without quite knowing why, by the last time I saw her, when I was twelve. I was certainly aware of sexuality and sexual desire then, but just barely: the next year in school (eighth grade) was when it all became about as clear as it was ever going to. (It was the next summer, I remember that I read Boys and Sex, not on my father's urging -- I think it was Hugh who'd discovered it -- but with his surprising approval.)

posted by william 11:27 PM
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