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

Thursday, February 24, 2005

I remember the answer to "What time is it?" some kids in fifth (?) grade would invariably give: "Half past the cow's ass, a quarter past his balls." I think I found this unremarkable as anatomy because it was from a time when a) I assumed both sexes had balls (hence the joke whose refrain was "rubber balls"; and b) I didn't know cows were female.

posted by william 11:45 PM
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Wednesday, February 23, 2005

I remember finding silkworms and some kind of golden larvae on the plants by the driveway, in the days after the rains. Morning glory grew on the balcony right overhead, facing the east and the sun. So there was something special about the driveway region, quaint even while being so utilitarian, and its beauty so dependent on dawn and daylight.

posted by sravana 7:25 PM
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Tuesday, February 22, 2005

I remember my uptown grandmother's nylon string bag. It would hang, shrunken and small, from a doorknob on a kitchen closet door; sometimes I think there were more than one. I remember hers as purple or yellow (like remembering whether you dream in color -- which I do -- remembering arbitrary colors from the past is an interesting exercise in underdetermination). They were a little creepy, like her hairnets. I didn't quite get them, or how you opened them, or how they really held things expanded. I was surprised to find that my downtown grandmother had such a bag too -- it seemed associated with the gnarled and hairnetted life that my uptown grandmother lived.

posted by william 1:05 PM
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Monday, February 21, 2005

I remember Hunter Thompson -- reading him, I mean. I remember reading Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, just when I was getting into those drugs. It was a kind of druggy sequel to The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, the book that got more college students into LSD than any other -- during those days, anyhow. And after loving Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (source, I now realize, of all of James Crumley's mysteries), I read Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, 1972, which was not what I expected but was amazing, and I guess was the first time I realized that there was a behind-the-scenes story: it was my first brush with political sophistication.

posted by william 9:45 AM
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Sunday, February 20, 2005

I remember being appalled the first time I saw or noticed adult scissors (I think they belonged either to my downtown grandmother who was a good seamstress [she'd worked in a glove factory in Paris and then I think in New York too as a youth and as a young immigrant] or to Sally Hoge). What appalled me was their asymmetry. The scissors we used in school, with our Elmer's glue and our collage-making, had two circular loops for our fingers. But these adult scissors had one loop for the thumb and that longer oblong squarish witch-like loop for the index and middle fingers. They were handed -- as I became aware when I tried to put them in my other hand and they wouldn't cut. So the blades weren't symmetrical either! Zippers were. I liked zippers. But not scissors.

In fact they probably entered into my dislike for the double-looped printed character g (in Times Roman or American Typewriter) which I posted about before, and which probably reminded me of the scissors, or at least revulsed me in the same way.

posted by william 7:06 PM
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Tuesday, February 15, 2005

I remember the glass wool that was part of the filter aparatus for my goldfish tank. The tank sat on top of my dresser, along (at one point) with the one for my gerbils. I remember packing glass wool -- but how tightly was always a question -- and charcoal together. I never thought to ask why, until now. And charcoal was familiar to me but glass wool wasn't. It came in plastic bags and you grabbed a handful like the cotton it resembled. But it wasn't cotton, and I was never sure whether I should worry about the possibility of its cutting me. I didn't quite get what it was -- steel wool made sense but glass wool not really. The glass wool was probably the great sensory novelty that having goldfish introduced me to: a substance I otherwise wouldn't have dreamed existed, that was interesting and different from the array of generic substances part of my familiar world. Somehow it seemed right that it went into the machine, the pump, as part of machinery, not part of the phenomena machines made possible. But I was the one putting it in, changing it, throwing it out, and so it changed slightly my view of the possibilities of substances.

posted by william 12:01 PM
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Sunday, February 13, 2005

I remember Room 222 (the TV show).

posted by william 11:12 AM
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Saturday, February 12, 2005

I remember my mother's thick glasses. I would sometimes try them on, though I was forbidden to do so because she said they would harm my vision. So I'd try them on when I was in the bedroom and she was in the bathroom, and what I saw -- not through them but with them -- was a kind of forbidden sight, the sense of what grown-up seeing or incapacity to see was like, the extent to which adult life required -- and sustained -- massive intervention. It was all a kind of lucid, crystaline, hard and smoothed-surface blur that I saw through her lenses, and that seemed to be the space, rather than the sweet soft air of my own vision, my own surround, that adults lived in. (Not my father, though! He didn't need glasses. It was one of those fundamental differences between them. But it made my mother seem more competent, more knowledgeable, able to wear those glasses and the contacts that substituted for them sometimes.) Now my vision is probably worse than hers was then.

posted by william 6:10 PM
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Friday, February 11, 2005

I remember reading The Crucible in high school. I knew about Death of a Salesman, but we ended up reading the newer and more newly assigned Crucible instead. (I felt a little gypped, since the cooler older kids had read the classic play.) We had no idea it was about McCarthyism. But we did know that it was opposed to the Salem Witch trials. I remember seeing it on stage, maybe at the Vivian Beaumont, maybe at Circle in the Square, in a class trip after we'd read it. I think this might have been ninth grade. What I remember in particular was a lovely moment in the play, and in class when we were studying it, where (as our teacher pointed out) the husband tastes the soup his wife (Goody ???) has made while she's out of the room for a minute, and then surreptitiously adds salt to it. She returns and serves him the soup, asking anxiously what he thinks, how's it seasoned, and he praises her, says it's perfect. And our teacher pointed out what a lovely moment of self-effacing generosity that is. For me it had the desired effect of making the horrors to come that much more outrageous. Arthur Miller, thou shouldst be living at this hour. RIP.

posted by william 1:04 PM
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I remember that I started I remember / je me souviens three years ago yesterday, and that an enormous amount has changed in the perspective of the rememberer, and also that the kinds of things that I remember and haven't yet posted are very different from the kinds of things I was recovering or just noting at the start; and also that some of the things I've posted I forgot again until browsing; and also that somehow I missed the third anniversary yesterday, which seems like some allegory about remembering.

posted by william 12:14 AM
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Wednesday, February 09, 2005

I remember fountain pens, filling them every night. I didn't know of self-filling pens yet, so I'd struggle with the ink dropper and I'd put in too much and there'd be a mess on my fingers and floor. Ball-points were not allowed since they'd make for bad handwriting but this rule was too counterproductive... owing to the fountain pens' tendency to leak and their asymmetric, scratchy nibs. (And my handwriting was inherently, incurably bad by that time anyway.) When I got a little more practiced at filling, I tried to capitalise on the novelty of the ink-bottle-holes (which I called 'inkwells') in my classroom desk by fitting my ink-bottle in there and refilling at lunch. But it got stolen in a few days.

posted by sravana 1:51 PM
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Tuesday, February 08, 2005

I remember putting a model or a puzzle or maybe even a connect-the-dots together to produce a ship, and the ship had a keel! I didn't know ships had keels, and I thought there was something terribly wrong with what I'd done, since there was this excresence coming out of what should have been the smooth bottom of the ship. It bothered me. What was this thing? I recall either my mother or her mother telling me what it was. I also didn't like the fact that it was somehow by definition tilted off the midline, both when it was represented and in the way it worked. It was an inelegant extrusion and something that by its nature was about the asymmetry of the ship's relation to the sea -- both of which challenged my sense of the proprieties. Howard Kheel, the actor, looked just right, later, for what I disliked about keels.

posted by william 9:11 PM
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Thursday, February 03, 2005

I remember always being slightly puzzled that you would sometimes go through New Jersey to go up state or North. It was very hard for me, once I found out (to my shock!) that Manhattan was an island -- that of the five boroughs only the Bronx was part of the great comforting maternal mass of the continent -- to think of it as vertical. The East side and the West side were names for what felt to me like the North and South -- out of our window you would (I thought) look South towards New Jersey, and on the East Side North towards -- well kind of towards Connecticut. So why go South towards Jersey to go upstate?

At any rate, I remember once doing just that, riding with Ronnie Stern, Geoffrey's brother who'd just gotten into Lehigh, in one of two or three cars we were taking, maybe to their house in Vermont -- the Shangri-La of Windham where they skiied and where I always wanted to go because it seemed like heaven.

I remember that we took the Garden State Parkway, and that Jerry, their father, told Ronnie what exit to get off at. And I remember that while we were driving, Ronnie at one point had to do something -- but what? Get change for a toll? Put it away? -- and asked me to hold the wheel from the passenger seat. This was scary, unexpected -- did people do such things? -- and a little bit of an honor. Ronnie was adult enough to know that you could do this, but I was so innocent of driving that I didn't know it had ever been done (my parents never did such a thing). I did hold the wheel, nervously and without even faking aplomb, to Ronnie's mild amusement or disdain, and it was also interesting to be trusted to handle a car going 60 miles per hour by someone who was disdaining you for your cluelessness at the same time.

I remember, relevantly, a TV show where the bad guy pulls a gun on the hero and tells him where to drive. The hero floors the car and the bad guy starts panicking as they hit high speeds. He tells him to slow down, but the hero says, "Drop the gun! You can't shoot me or you'll die too." I liked this quick thinking. It seemed so unexpected and watertight.

posted by william 2:19 PM
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