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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
Wednesday, June 30, 2004
I remember coming upon the Appendix to some book I wass reading. I didn't know what it wass, but it was uninteresting and disappointing -- a kind of sheaf of broken promise, since I thought the exciting book was longer than it turned out to be. I thought of it as repellent in the same way that "I-books" (first person narratives) were repellent: a kind of hole in the fabric of the work disguised as substance but in fact just absence -- of hero (how could a first person be a hero?) or of substance (how could this unintersting supplementary material have any narrative density to it?).
Tuesday, June 29, 2004
I remember Mr. Baruch (seventh grade?) giving us -- as a "reward" -- a long and obscure word to know each week. The words I remember learning this way (there were others, though) were: temerity, ululation, and sesquipedelian, which he told us meant a six-foot word (and I still think of it as meaning this), but in fact means a one-and-a-half footer.
Sunday, June 27, 2004
I remember "Sorry Charlie." I'm not sure that I remember the other Danny Dark voices -- Raid kills bugs dead; the Budweiser ad -- but I remember being puzzled also that Charlie the tuna would want to be caught, and would demonstrate good taste in order to be killed and eaten. Now Danny Dark has been caught.
Thursday, June 24, 2004
I remember asking my mother -- I think about Lake Carmel -- why lakes didn't just seep away into the dirt, the way water did when you poured it on sand. I don't think she quite understood me, or she would have told me about water tables. But she told me that "springs" kept lakes full. So I imagined that lakes were somehow held up, like mattresses, by giant springs which kept the water from flowing away. I didn't see how, but the answers to my questions were clearly getting more baffling than the phenomena they were explaining, so I don't think I pursued the topic.
Wednesday, June 23, 2004
I remember that "The Star Spangled Banner" has several more verses. I remember sitting at my desk reading the hand-lattered hand-out with all the verses, or at least with two of them, when I learned the song. Also I remember that it only became the National Anthem some time in the twentieth century. I remember wondering what they sang at baseball games before that.
Monday, June 21, 2004
I remember that when I used to feed Powell (sometimes using the wall can-opener), I would try to shake his food out so that I wouldn't have to wash the spoon dedicated to that task. It was stainless steel with a textured handle. I hated washing it. The best food for shaking out was Alpo's chunks, usually horsemeat chunks. (And Powell sometimes bit the legs of the Sterns' horses, though I doubt he made the connection.) I found it disgusting to contemplate ever eating with that spoon, even washed. I think my parents still have it though, and do eat with it. I would also have to wash Powell's dish when he was done, which I hated. I preferred it when he licked the dish clean, so that it looked washed. But my mother would often check, either seeing gobs of that white dog-food fat on the dish, or feeling it with her fingers. I think I hated the idea of using anything to wipe the dish down, since now that thing -- paper towel, steel wool, sponge -- would get yucchy too.
Sunday, June 20, 2004
I remember can openers hanging on kitchen walls. This was a standard feature of (New York) kitchens. In ours that can-opener, painted white, like the kitchen itself (I seem to recall, but suddenly I'm not so sure -- maybe just the hinge?), wasn't very good, so we had more can-openers in the drawer.
Friday, June 18, 2004
I remember that Hugh Cramer taught me to clap my how to clap my hands loud. I remember that I learned about clapping hands -- about applause -- either from my mother or her mother. I think I asked what they were doing. And they clapped hands symmetrically, which made perfect sense to me. That's what I did from then on. But in the 72nd street bowling alley Hugh and I had to applaud something -- maybe a strike that someone else made? I just remember that that's where it was -- and Hugh was surprised by how weak my clapping was. He showed me that you could angle your hands with respect to each other, which I think I sort of knew. After all it was still symmetric. But he showed me also that the loudest claps came from striking the palm of your hand with the fingers of the other hand, so that your hands were asymmetric, fingertips at the base of the fingers of the other hand, heel of that other hand at the base of the fingertips of the first. I always loved symmetry, and wasn't happy about this new and obviously correct technique.
And it seemed a rebuke to my family as well, to the aesthetic of symmetry and therefore to the very notion of aesthetic sense, which Hugh, with his rough-and-tumble tough-guy practical manner seemed indifferent to (as far as I understood aesthetics then, at any rate).
Thursday, June 17, 2004
I remember learning about the equator. My mother told me it was the hottest place in the world. "An imaginary line." Somehow the idea was thrilling. And then I remember that Ecuador was named after the equator which runs right through it. So it seemed thrilling to be a citizen of Ecuador, a country whose essence was that it was at the equator.
Wednesday, June 16, 2004
I remember getting poison ivy. It was something my mother talked about, in Stormville. And then I got it a couple of times. I remember the Camoline Lotion (?) and not showering or bathing because you could spread it. I was actually surprised that your skin could be a place of toxicity. I had an inside/outside sense of what had to be protected: so I was fastidious about food and flecks of anything in my food. But skin was supposed to act as the boundary between inside and outside. It could touch anything that needed warding off. The idea that it could itself be a source of disease when it warded off the poison ivy was very troubling to me.
I remember also asking my mother what would happen if you swallowed poison ivy, thinking that whatever it did to your outside would be orders of magnitude higher inside. I think this was somewhere in the context of my mother's describing my father "crying on the inside." All these mysterious complications to the difference between inside and outside!
Monday, June 14, 2004
I remember that we used to say "touche" (you know: "toushay," which is probably how I thought it was spelled) when we meant: "en garde." I don't remember what we fenced with though -- plastic swords from Roman gladiator costumes? Hangers? Sticks?
Saturday, June 12, 2004
I remember "Ladies and Gents, Laugh-In looks at the news!"
Thursday, June 10, 2004
I remember "Try it, you'll like it." Try it, you'll like it. TRY it, you'll like it. So I tried it. Thought I was gonna die. My head, my stomach, I took two Alka-Seltzer. Then some return to "Try it, you'll like it, maybe in voice-over, but I can't quite remember.
I remember looking out the window of my room with binoculars -- I don't know where I got them but I associate having them with Hugh Cramer's being over, and maybe Brian Seeman. What I remember in particular was the puzzle -- my first conscious experience with minimax problems -- of how much to focus them. You got them to focus more and more sharply, and it felt as though you should just keep twisting the knob in that direction, and yet after a while you lost resolution and clarity. Why should this be? And why should there be a limit on clarity? And how could you know when you reached it? The Polaroid cameras we had, and later the Honeywell Pentax SLR that I owned usefully told you that you were in focus when frames lined up properly, without, I guess, any refraction. It was a neat trick, though I'm not sure quite how it was done. But those binoculars! They just sort of challenged your idea of vision, of the visual space you were in, and of what clarity and lucidity might be. Designed to help you see more, they just challenged one's serenity about seeing at all.
Tuesday, June 08, 2004
I remember when dial tone first pay phones came in. "This is a dial tone first pay phone. DO not deposit any money until you hear a dial tone." Now that's standard, but then you picked up a dead phone, deposited your dime, and waited for the dial tone.
I remember as well losing a dime in a phone. This was at the subway station at 242nd Street. The phone didn't make the connection and didn't return my money. I was in high school, and it was my last dime, maybe my last money (although I had a token to get home with). I called the Operator to complain, assuming that she would make the call for me. But all she would offer was to take my name and address to get the dime refunded. She wouldn't put me through under any circumstances. I was frustrated beyond belief.
Sunday, June 06, 2004
I remember that when we had weekend guests my mother would make a big plateful of scrambled eggs, which were always moist and great. This reminds me that weekdays I would make myself eggs before school, sometimes scrambled, sometimes sunnyside up, and then later over easy. At some point I got disgusted with the strings of protein that my overcooked eggs would always entangle themselves with, and then eggs became disgusting to me. But only for a while, and my mother's never.
I remember that eggs used to be mainly white, with brown as somewhat exotic. Now it's the other way around.
Saturday, June 05, 2004
I remember Archibald Cox. I went to a dinner with him in college, at a time when my command of years was sparser, so it seemed to me a long time after Watergate, though not to him. I was surprised to see, from his inability to tell where voices where coming from, that he was deaf in one ear. He was very charming in a bluff, straight, to the point way. I had no idea then what it meant to have had the courage to handle what he handled.
Friday, June 04, 2004
I remember how I liked getting tanned in the summer, especially my arms, and liked seeing the hairs on my arms bleached white or flaxen against my coppery skin.
I remember "Your Anchor banker -- he understands." And then a little later the commercial evolved so that that spritefully knowing commercial voice of feminine superiority -- young but with all the knowledge of mothers -- corrected or supplemented it with "Your Anchor banker -- she understands."
Wednesday, June 02, 2004
I remember that in, I think, The Great Escape, one person gets caught when he falls for the trick that he's taught others not to, which is to respond to someone talking English. He shows his papers, gets on a bus, and the Gestapo officer says, "Gut Luck!" "Thanks, old man," he replies, and gets pulled off and shot. Maybe he's one of the two who get shot when they're let off a truck for a minute to piss. I remember that in Stalag 17 the tip off about the chess game is the wire from which the bulb hangs over the board. I remember that in one or the other there's a character called "the scrounger" (James Garner?) and that I liked him so much I started stealing things (which led to big trouble), especially after Michael Hobin started calling me "the scrounger" as a term of praise. I remember Michael once kicked a pencil I was pretending was a knife or a gun in some game out of my hand. We were both amazed, and he yelled, two or three times, with delight, "Just like in the movies!" It was.
I remember Kim, the girl who sat next to me, I was going to say in third grade, but now I realize it was junior high because it was at the Franklin School. So it must have been seventh or eighth grade. Stacey, whom I thought strikingly beautiful, was in that class too. Kim was big and strapping. (I remember Stacey's last name, but not Kim's.) She would laugh at my jokes. I liked her but wasn't attracted to her. I think, recollecting this, that it was that year that I started becoming sexually aware. Kim may or may not have had a large red birthmark on her thigh. Her skin turned read under the slightest pressure, and I spent a lot of time wondering if the inchoate red area didn't come from the way she crossed her legs. And then she wore opaque tights a lot. I know that I became sexually aware that year because I remember the texture of those ribbed tights, and how I tried to turn myself on by fantasizing about Kim, especially the way when she laughed at her desk she'd double over sweeping her hair close to me. It didn't quite work, this fantasizing. I never fantasized about Stacey, although I think she became sexually active first, with a stud in our class named Judson. (I remember Stacey reacing down his shorts once at gym!) Kim clearly represented some emerging encroaching encumbring physicality for me. She was the sweetest person, and I was completely loyal to her sweetness, always entertaining and friendly to her, and this made me resent her a little bit. But only a little. If only she could have fitted my fantasies better! I wonder how different my life would have been then.
Tuesday, June 01, 2004
I remember my surprise that four had a u in it, that vacuum had two u's (I got this wrong on a spelling test), and also that you wrote "4" without the triangular shape, but with the top open. I remember also that I wrote "5" wrong, since the top horizontal was supposed to be done last, as a kind of flag to the body of the numeral. But I always wrote it as a single arabesque. I think that of these things, the thing that surprised me most was that you didn't write a 4 the way it looked in type. This made much more sense for the letter g the way it used to appear on typewriters, as a kind of hanging pair of spectacles or pince-nez. (I remember I used to think they were prince-nez.) It was much harder to write that g. But why the 4?
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