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, March 16, 2004

I remember my bright orange parka. (I thought, when my parents announced we were getting one, that it was spelled "parker.") I wore it around a lot, and I remember walking my dog in the rain down to Riverside Park one Saturday. It was capacious, and I had the hood up. In the field we always played softball on were a bunch of guys maybe in their early twenties. I was probably fourteen. They looked vaguely threatening -- they were roistering in the rain, or maybe just loitering in that way that threatening groups loiter. So I kept my distance. One of them saw me and pointed me out to a couple of others. One of them called to me, "Hey baby, come here!" He blew me a kiss and made that swinging embracing lovey-dovey motion that I'm not quite sure I could replicate but which he did very gracefully. They thought I was a girl! Which suggested an easy way out of this predicament: disabuse them. But their mistake was oddly thrilling to me. And so I had what felt like a girlish response to it: I didn't want to disappoint them; I wanted to be nice. So I smiled and shook my hooded head girlishly, and then pulled my dog back up the hill away from them, breaking -- they claimed -- their hearts.

posted by william 7:25 AM
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