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

Wednesday, January 14, 2004

I remember flippers. All I really wanted was a mask for the pool or beach, but they were hard to come by without also getting flippers and a snorkel, with an ingenious little bobbing ball to keep the water out that never worked. I remember that Janet swam with flippers in her pool, but for me they just made swimming harder and walking impossible. But in Bellagio, Michelle (ma belle), also used flippers -- and she could water-ski! So now they seemed a mark of status. Perhaps they would be another way that I could get closer to her.

My first sentence to her, I now remember with anguish and longing, was the day after I'd spotted her as Daniella's cousin. I was down on the beach feeding the ducks early in the morning, and she came down. She was curious about what I was doing! I offered her a bit of bread, and asked, "Du willst?" I knew she knew German, Italian, French and Luxembourgish -- now -- I mean right now, tonight! -- I see that she was very vain about repeating this linguistic litany. But she didn't know English. I wonder if she understood that I was offering her the bread to feed the ducks, not that I was hoping that she would take bread at my hands. I'll never know, I guess.

Still, I never quite saw the point -- except that she could show her gracefulness, diving off the raft with flippers on -- till years later when I did real snorkeling in Hawaii. The snorkel worked better too. And so did the masks -- I hated the fact that the masks of my youth always let water in, which always sloshed up my nose.

posted by william 11:15 PM
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