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

Sunday, June 19, 2005

I remember seeing Danny Schneider's fencing shoes when I first thought about fencing at school. They had treads that went up the heels, which I thought was really cool. This had to do with advancing, which you did heel first. I never got shoes like that, but they were for me the shoe-equivalent of my pip-palmed goalie gloves.

I remember, thinking about how I came to love playing goalie so much, another one of the three or four best times of my life: the day we played field hockey in the gym at Franklin School, with plastic pucks, and I played goalie and stopped every shot. It was an hour of pure energetic pleasure. I decided to be a soccer goalie because I thought the soccer goal was as small as the hockey goal, and then the soccer ball was so big, it would be easy to stop. At some point I saw some pictures of an amazing European goalie, maybe the Soviet one -- I think the World Cup was coming up -- all in black, his black long-sleeved jersey especially stylish, and perfectly horizontal as he made a diving save, his face coolly expressionless, which added to my desire to be a goalie. I remember that Howie Grunthal praised some saves I made when I played: he was fullback and impressed. His way of talking was to negate with sarcastic emphasis. "Oh, no, that wasn't a good save, uh-huh; uh-huh you're not a good goalie." I was very pleased.

I remember that Hugh and I used to play soccer in my room with a playground ball when I was about eight or so. Sometimes when not too many people were home we'd do it in the hallway and living room too (they flowed into each other). That was also fun, since the quarters were so close that his superior athletic ability didn't mean that he could just dribble past me. Plus, I think, I imagined that soccer was my game; until in high school I tried to block the shots of Nicky Tocksig (?) who was Danish, and Egbert Perry, who was I think Jamaican. Boy were they scary.

posted by william 11:30 PM
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