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, June 02, 2004

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.

posted by william 6:36 AM
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