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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.
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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, October 31, 2003
I remember trick-or-treating, and that one person once asked us for a trick (maybe the first time I went), and we had no idea what he was asking for. I had sort of thought that they were supposed to perform a trick for us, if they weren't going to give us a treat. It might have been the same person -- at any rate it was some earnest but good-humored intellectual -- who played the piano for us as a treat, some Broadway song, I believe. We didn't think that was a treat, plus it took a long time that we might have spent getting candy. But we were polite. I remember that one apartment always had a bowl full of dimes, instead of candy. Usually we'd end up with tons of candy and a little money -- plus all the money for Unicef. I remember stealing some of the UNICEF money to buy comics, but not very much of it. I wouldn't have been able to refold the box so it was just a question of trying to shake coins out of the slot. I put the quarters back in, but kept a few nickels and dimes. I remember the results of shaking, and how you wanted the coin that came out to be a dime. I remember one person -- or couple, maybe -- opening the door when we rang and refusing to give us anything. I was puzzled that they were surprised and irritated to see us. We must have been one of dozens of groups from the building. We went up to the fifteenth floor, and then walked down the stairs instead of taking the elevator. No adults chaperoned us. In buildings, you don't know who's home and who's Halloween-friendly, so you just ring at every door. Some opened and some didn't, but those that opened always had treats. No one liked getting apples. We were told about razor blades, but didn't take the threat seriously. It was just that apples were always available at home, and candy wasn't. I remember the smell of the lacquered cardboard halloween masks we'd buy on 83rd street, and the elastic cords that always threatened to rip through their eyelets at the sides of the mask.
Thursday, October 30, 2003
I remember when our next door neighbors, the Hoges, installed an intercom system in their apartment (2-H). It was the first intercom I ever saw (though I guess I knew the school version from the principal's daily announcements. I was surprised and perturbed to find, when I went to Franklin for Junior High, that the principal and the dean could listen in on class as well as announce things to us). I remember the white boxes in each room, with the white wires stretched against the molding, and the expertise of the whole family in the way they could use this system. Yet it was also a kind of rebuke to the kids, who were supposed to stop screaming from room to room (which they continued doing). Still the way they all knew how to get such a thing installed (like their air-conditioner too! We didn't get one till we moved to 7-F), and then to use it as a family, seemed part of their general, all-American Protestantism.
Wednesday, October 29, 2003
I remember, from cop shows (Dick Tracy too?), the Miranda warning (which must have been brand new, and which I didn't know by name at the time): "Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law." I never understood why it positively would be used against the accused. How could you use the truth against an innocent person? How could you use a denial of guilt against the denier? Somehow it seemed the police had ways of making what you said proof of your guilt: as though they had control of meanings, or of the consequences of meanings no matter what the meaning of what was said. I was curious to see such a protestation used against the accused in a court of law -- it promised to be very interesting -- but it never was.
Tuesday, October 28, 2003
I remember -- another useful fact learned from comic books -- that if you die in a dream, you die. And I noticed that I did always wake up before I died in disaster dreams and nightmares. I think I learned this from a Batman comic. The bad guy somehow gets people to dream that they die, and then their hearts stop beating. I don't remember how he does this. It never occured to me that the writers of the comics couldn't possibly know this as a fact.
Monday, October 27, 2003
I remember the pointlessness of the UHF dial on our tvs. You spun and spun and almost never got anything: I remember looking for something in the low teens, and then again something in the eighties. On the whole UHF seemed non-existent, but the triumph of hope over experience would occasionally prompt me to try to tune in on a show that seemed fascinating in the TV section of the newspaper. I seem to recall wanting to watch Flipper this way once. It was always a grueling exercise in frustration. I remember the round UHF antennae, which did nothing. I remember using hangers (as we did on our walkie-talkies) to try to boost reception, to no avail. Once, though, a junior high teacher -- Mr. Baruch, I think, who taught us the word "aficionado" because (like me) he was so into Hemingway, and who introduced us to Death in the Afternoon -- told us you could see the bullfights from Puerto Rico Saturday afternoons on some high-two-digit channel. I tuned in -- I think this was one of those Spanish language channels that I could get on UHF, but that I'd always ignored -- and there in very fuzzy black and white, on the kitchen portable, was a bullfight, and a fighter getting tossed on the bull's horns. I couldn't believe it. It seemed both shocking and entirely unreal, just the barest outline coming out of the black and white snow and fog. It occurs to me now that this couldn't have been live; that they must have been doing a repeated replay of some disaster, or some previous fight. But the ghost of a southern truth seemed to disclose itself as its own nebulosity in our kitchen, and then drift out of tune and fade forever. (It made The Sun Also Rises seem far more unreal, like a cartoon or garish comic, and not the depiction of real bullfights.)
Sunday, October 26, 2003
I remember seeing how far I could walk down the street with my eyes closed. I would always aim for twenty steps, though things often started getting ticklish around ten. How far I would try to walk was a function of several different things: were there people in front of me? Coming towards me or receding? Where there people behind me? Was there traffic on the street? Parked cars? Trees on the sidewalk? Garbage? Balustrades? Wrought iron fences? Sun or darkness? How wide was the sidewalk? I would always slow down for the last few steps, which always became a question of will. And yet I was rarely as far off of my planned trajectory as I always feared I was. If there were people behind me I imagined they thought I was drunk. When I was drunk (like, maybe, senior year of high school, the year of Southern Comfort) I'd walk more rapidly, in a haze of self-assurance.
I remember as well that much easier was going up or down steps with your eyes closed. There's a kind of visual or iconic counting that goes on, so that you know when you reach the last step, even when they're twelve or fourteen of them, without either counting the steps you see or the steps you take. Your feet know. Steps are easier. But I remember how surprisingly jarring it is to miss a step. To expect to have to step down one more riser, and to find you're already at the bottom.
I remember doing this once in Long Island, at night, through some fields with trees in them, and Jimmy Buhler (of whom, at some other point, much more later) watching me and wondering what was going on. I told him and he offered to guide me. This seemed a neat experiment, but he couldn't resist guiding me right into a tree, which really hurt. Jimmy once ran right into our sliding glass door, though, banging his nose terrible (though not breaking it) a scene I remembered when reading Michael Cunningham's amazing (fictional) account of the death of the narrator's brother when he crashes through a door and pulls a piece of glass out of his carotid artery.
Saturday, October 25, 2003
I remember frontsies backsies. To let someone cut in line, you let them in front of you, and then they let you in front of them: now they were in the line. This seemed unfair to me when I was its victim, and eminently fair when I was its beneficiary. Interestingly, I thought the phrase was "front seats back seats" which didn't make sense but didn't not either, and at least was real English. So invented baby-talk is at a higher level than standard vocabulary.
Friday, October 24, 2003
I remember a particular kid whose hair grew really fast, so that in a flash he seemed my age and not the full two-year-generation younger that he had been -- Peter Obstler. And I remember one day (this was on the basketball courts south of the Promenade, on 80th street or so, in Riverside Park) Peter said that he was trying to savor the years before he graduated high school (I think he was in seventh grade and I was in ninth), because he knew that once he graduated, he'd just suddenly accelerate and find himself eighty years old. This seemed amazing, a thought that had never occured to me but that was strikingly, vividly right. Well, it isn't happening as fast as Peter predicted, but I must say it is happening a whole lot faster than I anticipated before he made that quirkily charming, melancholy remark, grinning with a kind of lopsided punkish authority as he stood with his back to the bench that we were tying our sneakers on that day.
(If I was in ninth grade, I was fourteen, and my uptown grandfather would have been eighty-one. So this made plausible how he got to be that old too. After he died, years later, my grandmother would also lament: "It is easy to grow old, but hard to be old.")
Wednesday, October 22, 2003
I remember how the hair of kids I knew got longer and longer. They shifted registers of life, became different people, as their hair became luxurious in a way that much outpaced their chronological or physical growth. Twelve to fourteen wasn't much psychologically, no matter what concern the earnest adults kept expressing. But the difference in hair length! Even curly-headed kids, like me (who hated my curls), had hair that tumbled backwards in long streaming waves. It was as though they were giving themselves to the accelerations of time, as though the rapidity of aging which was already (although just barely) starting to be an issue was something they were so insouciant about as to hasten it onwards with this yet more rapid development, as they changed who they were as quickly as their hair grew. It grew fast enough to make the sorites paradox (when do imperceptible changes yield perceptibility? How?) vivid and almost visceral: the imperceptible was breathing down your neck. They were the same and different, and so nearly instantaneously.
I remember wanting my hair to grow long, and the mammoth struggles I had with my parents over this, and measuring whether it came down over my eyebrows, and whether I could suck a strand hanging down over my foreheard or not.
Tuesday, October 21, 2003
I remember different ways of picking up tennis balls. I remember seeing a girl pick up a ball by raising ball, racket, and foot simultaneously, right up to her other hand. I learned to do this, but then preferred the American way of pulling the ball towards yourself while compressing it slightly, using the follow-through from the downward, selfward angled compression to pull the racket below the expanding, rising ball, to let it roll on to the strings. I remember that this was harder with Wilson T-1200's, which gouged clay courts when you did this and which got badly scuffed by hard courts. I remember the baskets we used to pick up scores of balls after serving. You pressed down over the ball and it popped through the slats and into the basket, with a sudden satisifying give that had a little bit of anal eroticism about it. I remember trying to fill up those baskets, but that there were limits before you couldn't do it any more, well before the baskets were close to capacity.
Monday, October 20, 2003
I remember the chalky taste of Kaopectate. I remember my mother giving it to me (on Dr. Steff's orders) but mainly my uptown grandmother doing so, either at our house or at hers. I liked the big measuring spoon that I took it from -- three or four tablespoons at a time -- and I liked the taste, whose wide-spreading alkalinity is associated for me with memories of my grandmother and her warm, low accented voice (the European feeling K in "Kaopectate," as in Kafka's Amerika whence the somewhat later polemical spelling) was part of the association with her none-too-competent accent. I liked also that the bottle was black and white but the liquid inside it was a profound chalky pink, as though in fullfillment of the bottles low-key, generous, gentle promise of relief.
Sunday, October 19, 2003
I remember film strips. I remember the reels they came on, like the reels of the movies my father shot, but bigger. I remember not knowing if they were film strips or scripts or scrips. Somehow they all fit. I heard the word "scrip" at some Purim party, I think: we were given scrip to buy treats and toys. And since the scrip came in perforated sheets, it seemed not unlike the sproket-holed film, with the clicking sound that it made seeming the auditory coutnterpart to the perforations. The idea that these were scripts was also obvious, somehow: they were pre-determined in their meaning. And all of this would eventually...mesh with the idea of stripping gears, on projectors, and in cars. Somehow the words strip, script, and scrip felt attached to each other by their shared letters, and perforated in ways appropriate to all of them where they diverged. Perhaps I'm just registering a faint residual dislexia, since I still have trouble with the difference between specter and sceptre, also around those letters (s, p, c, r, and t), but still the connection seemed very real to me.
Saturday, October 18, 2003
I remember "Man alive! Four out of five...like Yoo Hoo (chocolate drink)!" Yoo Hoo and Bosco were competitors. I followed Hugh Cramer in liking Bosco better. I guess if you mixed Bosco and milk you got something like Yoo Hoo. I thought "Man alive" was a version of the ubiquitous "man" (as in "Oh, man, what are you talking about?") but it seems to predate it: I just saw the phrase in a book from 1946.
Friday, October 17, 2003
I remember Yaz bread. I think it was a variety of Wonder Bread. Or maybe Wonder just had Yastrzemski endorse their bread one year. It was the first time I heard of him. His name reminded me of pastrami. I liked the word Yaz, with its extreme letters.
Wednesday, October 15, 2003
I remember that you always had to win sets in tennis by two games. Occasionally, sets would go as high as 20-18. Endurance really counted. (As a cross country runner, I had endurance, but not speed.) Then sudden death came in, but you still had to win by two points, as in a game. It was best of 12, as I recall, and the final score was 8-6 (or was it 7-5). Now (I believe) you can win by one point, with the final set score 7-6.
I remember subtleties of score-keeping. You might be ahead Fifteen-love, but if your opponent tied it up it was Five-All. Thirty-thirty was never deuce, even if it was the practical equivalent of deuce. If you won on a second serve, you were ahead Five-love instead of Fifteen-love. I never heard these conventions in professional matches, only in the games we played. I never understood why the first two points were worth fifteen each, and the third was worth ten (as in "Forty-thirty", or "Forty-fifteen"--but never Forty-five).
I remember that "Love" ("word known to all men") is derived from French l'oeuf, the egg, i.e. zero.
Monday, October 13, 2003
I remember thinking that if you went out in the cold you would catch ammonia. It seemed odd, that way adult terminology seems odd but not interesting, that a cleaning product and a disease should have the same name, and probably be related to each other. I was surprised when I found out it was "pneumonia." What word starts with pn?
Sunday, October 12, 2003
I remember toilet paper in pastel colors, to match your bathroom. There was sky blue, pink, and a pale tan. Was tan strangely demure or strangely daring?
Saturday, October 11, 2003
I remember a liberal public service ad soliciting more government money for substandard housing in New York, which had a girl in a rundown kitchen calling, "Here, kitty! Here! kitty, kitty, kitty." She was cute (about six). The voiceover was serious. One was disturbed that she'd been left alone. Finally we got to see the kitty she was trying to entice. It was a rat.
Thursday, October 09, 2003
I remember: "Will you be my PLP?" If you said yes, the person leaned on you. PLP = Public (or Private) Leaning Post. I guess we didn't really know the difference between public and private then, only that they were coordinated, since "private" is actually more appropriate -- "my PLP" but we thought of "public" as the standard answer, and only used "private" when the person we asked said, "I know what that means: Public Leaning Post."
Wednesday, October 08, 2003
I remember a coin bank, that might have belonged to Geoffrey Stern, or to Conrad, or to Lem. It was a clear plastic coin sorter. You dropped a bunch of change in a funnel, and the coins rolled down past gradually increasing holes until they could drop in where they belonged, in a poker-chip like stack. I thought it was really neat. It had graduated markings up the sides so you could see how much money you had. It illustrated vividly how much more than pennies quarters were worth. The graduation up the quarters slot was in dollars, whereas the top of the pennies slot was only fifty cents.
I remember the brass change mechanisms that newspaper salesmen and bus drivers used to have. They dispensed a coin from one of four slots when the person giving you change pressed in a spring lever with his (almost always his; but I do remember an anomalous moment when a woman had such a dispenser) thumb. The old guys and the bus drivers were very fast, bewilderingly so I discovered when I got a toy version (maybe not a toy either but certainly not so heavy duty as the professional model). They were like those people who were faster with abacuses than accountants were with adding machines.
Tuesday, October 07, 2003
I remember that Mr. Durocher used to have "conniption fits." Also that I didn't and don't know how to spell that word. Is it one? It was his own term for his violent but voluntary tantrums.
Monday, October 06, 2003
I remember that on Yom Kippur eve we would go to my uptown grandmother's house for dinner -- a late one, well into darkness, with matzoh ball soup, knoedel, chicken (I remember I liked dark meet then!), 7-Up ("You like it. It likes you."), cole slaw, two kinds of cake (the linzer torte I always demanded, and dobos torte, or her amazing apple and plum tart or nuss torte or chocolate layer cake), and then the strange fruits she served, big and bloated like her arthritic fingers. One Yom Kippur my mother wasn't talking to her, but my father got them talking again by saying it was Yom Kippur (more about this years-long fight in some other post, I hope). Then the next morning, my parents would sleep as late as possible. 10! 11! Noon, one time! Much later than their already late sleep on weekends. At 2 or so we would go back to my grandmother's house and break the fast with cold-cuts (including tongue!) cakes and cafe mit Schlag (which I loved); some of my grandparents' elderly friends -- Vlado Hertz, the probably gay bachelor older than my grandfather almost always. Later, when I was older, I would fast till darkness, but my parents and grandparents never did. In those later days, especially during that period of mild religious mania I've mentioned before, I would go to the Association of Yugoslav Jews service in a brownstone basement on 99th street (where I also went to the Purim party I described a year and a half ago or so). The congregation was largely sephardic, and my downtown grandfather would always go there, so I went with him. He was the only one in the family who wouldn't eat pork or shellfish. My uptown grandfather -- Ashkenazi -- came at least once, for the full day of prayers (I don't think he stayed for the afternoon, but my downtown grandfather and I did). I brought my tallis -- I think I got one for my Bar Mitzvah -- and I remember the different traditions of the tallis. I'm probably not getting this right, but as I recall the Sephardic tradition was not to wear it as often as the Ashkenazis did, so my uptown grandfather put his tallis on when the rabbi and cantor did, but very few other people did so. I wasn't sure what to do, but finally I put mine on.
I remember wanting to wear sneakers, as the orthodox did, on Yom Kippur, but not being allowed to. They looked really fine in their suits and sneakers: they had secret knowledge, a puzzle to almost everyone else, Christian and non-orthodox, but I knew why they wore sneakers (no leather!). I remember in this connection that Schulchan Aurach requires you to eat meat on the Sabbath, as a reminder of the sin of carniverousness that came with the fall and the expulsion. But on Yom Kippur we put that sin away, like all others.
I remember the crushed blue velvet case of my tallis and of my teffilin, and the gold brocade with which Hebrew letters were stamped into the case. I loved the feel of it, and the odd dark plastic (or painted metal) zipper discretely covered by overlapping piping to open and close the bags. It was as though the zipper -- that modern technology I never understood -- consented to be discrete, to accommodate itself to the accoutrements of piety and belief, and to help out in a self-effacing manner, and so confirm the relevance of these ancient ancillaries to devotion. I think that the zippers and the sneakers both spoke to the same thing in me: the moving thrill of something modern subordinating itself to uses which their modern inventors hadn't contemplated, as though the objects themselves took a kind of life from the truth of the tradition to which they contributed their functions. They joined in, and what that meant was that everyone and everything could join in, not in that sublime sense of "declaring the glory of God," but in a more intimate sense like that of New York, and what it meant for me to be told by Hugh Cramer that it was a Jewish city (when it certainly was that but also a million other things as well): the world makes itself available to a way of thinking, makes its universality possible, in a kind of act of friendship which it is always lovely to see the world offering. I still feel that way about New York, but I'm not so sure about the world.
Sunday, October 05, 2003
I remember that I learned the word especially from my mother. I thought I was mishearing "special," but I wasn't. I remember that she used this word a lot (and may still do so; but I noticed it then). It was a word I associated with her -- an intensifier of some sort. There was an odd expertise that it signalled: she knew things, and she knew their subtleties and varieties and could focus in on those parts of them about which something was especially true; or on those things in the world about which something was especially the case. I remember that it was interesting that especially didn't mean special in the high-praise mode of special (as in "a special occasion," which I guess is where I most heard and used the word). This may have been my first intuition about how adverbs worked: they could add texture and nuance to a judgment or the the object of a judgment. And that texture and nuance was that of my mother, of her voice, of her saying those four syllables.
Friday, October 03, 2003
I remember reading lots of James Michener. I read The Source and learned the history of the Jews. I read a novel in eleventh or twelfth grade about college kids going to Morocco and taking drugs, which I liked. I read another novel, which was the same vintage as The Source whose name and subject I'm now failing to recall. In The Source I remember a character who gets himself uncircumsized (yuch!) so he can join the Roman army. His elderly father sees him wrestling in some games, and is so shocked and outraged that he lifts up his cane and kills him. I also remember that I first saw the term El Shadai in The Source. I tried reading Hawaii but was bored to tears. But I derived important sexual misinformation from it, namely that it takes roughly four copulations to produce a pregnancy. (Some missionary's wife gets pregnant on the boat over.)
I also got sexual misinformation from the Shulchan Aruch, the seventeenth century code of Jewish Law, which I read obsessively in my phase of religious mania, inspired both by The Source and by my best friend Geoffrey, to wit: the hymen prevents conception during a woman's first copulation. (This had to do with some woman who gets pregnant in the Bible -- it might have been Eve.) Later I thought this knowledge would come in handy. Fortunately, when it did become relevant I wasn't so sure about it any more.
Thursday, October 02, 2003
I remember that once when I failed to return three books to the New York Public Library in eleventh grade (one of them was Beckett's Three Novels) a library investigator came to our building looking for me! I wasn't there, but my mother was. How could something so trivial lead to this Kafkaesque persecution? The Public Library had investigators? They pursued people through the city? The investigator left word that he'd be back if I didn't return the books. I didn't know who I was in more trouble with, the Library or my mother. It was interesting, and alas this was not the last time that this was so, the possibility of being in trouble deeper than the trouble you could be in with your parents. Up until then my parents were as much the origin and final arbiters of trouble as they were of love. But this was my discovery of real trouble -- the trouble that life brings with her in her equipage -- and how much farther than the parental realm it can extend, how powerless parental love finally is to neutralize it.
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