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, July 31, 2005

I remember that my parents had two pillows each, and my sister and I had one each. I thought two pillows was another mysterious perquisite of adulthood, like wine or beer: something they got to have but which didn't seem particularly enticing to me. It did make their made bed look beautiful, though, under the satin bedspread my father gave my mother one year in the old apartment (2G).

posted by william 9:48 AM
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Thursday, July 28, 2005

I remember when our class, or grade maybe, went to visit the school for the blind. We played a version of softball or kickball against them; they ran down the base paths guided by waist-high string they touched with their fingers. We were out if they fielded more or less cleanly (by sound); they were out if we fielded and made the play. I think I expected them to be better than they were, and of course not nearly as good as they were. We'd been told that they were really good at negotiating the world, and not to make the mistake of being patronizing. I thought this would mean that they carried their heads like the sighted, but they still tilted their heads and cocked their faces upwards, to hear the world around them. I think we might have played blindfolded too or done something blindfolded, and of course we were absurd.

posted by william 11:38 AM
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Tuesday, July 26, 2005

I remember the vinyl toe-caps (I just learned the term from Cormac McCarthy's new novel) of my Keds, and of my Converses, where I would write things in magic marker, my intitials I remember, and then later bits of phrases from books I liked, Stephen-Dedalus like quotations, often Beckett; eventually I wrote them in small letters on the sides of the soles too. I remember black, green, and red sneakers that I owned, and different colored markers, though I don't remember what color they were.

posted by william 6:29 PM
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Monday, July 25, 2005

I remember going to see my newborn brother, and being worried, because the first things I noticed were the bluish tone on his skin, his surprisingly long nails, and the general wrinkled appearance of six-hour-olds (but he was the first I'd seen). I wasn't convinced when they said the blue was from the sudden cold... it was summer and scorching. I was afraid he'd hurt himself with his nails, and wondered if it was possible that he'd scratched my mother with them before. I remember the dream I had a couple of nights later in which he'd suddenly grown up, and was talking down to me as I imagined an older sibling would, and my keen sense of disappointment: the only person who didn't have authority over me, and now even he did! But it turned out to be a dream-within-a-dream: I woke up in it to find that he wasn't grown up at all. The funny part about it is (and this must be false or overlapping memory), his infant face had much sharper features in the dream... he looked like he did a month or two later. I remember that when I finally stopped worrying about his skin and nails, he had to be treated under the bright lights for his newborn jaundice, and I was worried again - nearly terrified - that the light would burn him.

posted by sravana 12:12 AM
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Thursday, July 21, 2005

I remember "Born Free." It was a paperback book we had. I couldn't read it, or thought I couldn't, because it was not a children's book. I looked at the photographs in the middle of the book. One in particular puzzled me, a picture of chlidren sitting on an elephant. The caption listed their names; I read & read but I always ended up with one name more than the number of children.

The caption was: "Atop Margie, left to right: Frank, Betty, Oscar,..." etc.

My misreading also caused me to mispronounce "Margie," when I said it in my head. The stresses of the 'first' name, "Atop," sort of forced a flourish onto the last syllable of the 'last' name, "mar-GEEE."

posted by Carceraglio 2:09 AM
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Monday, July 18, 2005

I remember Peter Rogers's string of phrases of false enthusiasm: "Whoopie doo, hoo la la, climb a ladder, pull a rope, swing a vine," all with studied boredom. Later when I read the phrase "Woop de do" it felt wrong to me.

posted by william 11:56 PM
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Wednesday, July 13, 2005

I remember trying to teach my sister to ride a bike. I also remember trying to teach her to read, at much the same time. I remember, or condense, two memories: trying to get her to say B-O-Y really fast so that it sounded like "beoye", almost "boy" and trying to get her to stay up by the cannons in Riverside Park at 88th street. I remember her panicking and grabbing for the small cannon as we went by it instead of holding on to the handlebars, and falling. But I think I was saying B-O-Y really fast to her as I was pushing her along before that. I remember when she fell the frozen feeling of strange impotence that I felt her having as the solid cannon turned out not to help keep her up, as it always did, but to be the thing that would implacably resist her desire not to fall. I remember Hugh and myself actually teaching her to ride on the promenade, maybe a few days later. I would run after the bike after she'd gone a few feet alone, and grab the back of the seat, and I remember puncturing my hand on a wayward spring when I grabbed it. But she didn't fall.

posted by william 7:28 AM
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Monday, July 11, 2005

I remember deciding who chose first in softball by tossing a bat into the air and alternating hands contiguously up the grip -- whoever couldn't get their whole hand on the bat lost; the other captain chose first, the loser got the next two (I liked this compensation), and the first team got last licks.

I remember that when my father taught me to throw and catch a softball I was disappointed -- it seemed like such a feeble substituted offered to kids for baseball -- but then it turned out that softball was what everyone played in the park (on the street it was stickball, with a broomhandle and a Spalding). Baseball was strangely not an option -- strangely I mean because it was the only game really that we couldn't more or less just do ourselves. It was too hard to play catcher, and too dangerous, and too hard to hit the ball, and we didn't have the space for it anyhow. When I played JV baseball in high school I was surprised by the way we could play it, just like the football players actually tackling each other.

posted by william 11:01 AM
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Thursday, July 07, 2005

I remember the London Bus my parents brought me from London when I was six. It was a double-decker bus. I wished we had them in New York.

posted by william 4:07 PM
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Wednesday, July 06, 2005

I remember sweet, smart Rick Fortgang who was in tenth grade with me. (He was the first Richard I knew as Rick and not Dick, and the first Rick I knew who was a Richard and not a Fredrick or an Eric.) The next year he went to Exeter, where you could learn Greek. I remember him sitting thoughtfully in the dining hall, telling us about Exeter and the classes you could take there. I was sorry that he was going, since I just barely knew him. I still am.

posted by william 12:18 AM
. . . 3 comments

Friday, July 01, 2005

I remember my mother knew who Parnell was. I was reading Potrait of the Artist, and assumed that the stuff I was interested in was arcane if you weren't interested in Joyce. But lots more people turned out to know who Parnell and Kitty O'Shea were than had read Joyce.

posted by william 8:26 AM
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