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

Friday, October 21, 2005

I remember when my cousin Igo came to visit from Sao Paulo. He was seventeen, but I don't know how old I was. Eight? My downtown grandmother talked about him a lot, or maybe she was talking him up to me. His arrival was long-awaited and quite thrilling. I was surprised at how much acne he had; she didn't talk about him as a person with acne. (Maybe I was ten or eleven, which is when my best friend Hugh was persecuted with acne, enough so that he went to see doctors about it; he got boils that had to be lanced. It didn't detract from his charisma one bit, though. It was just another fact about him.)

Igo took me sledding, down the big hill between 89th and 91st. We sat together and ran under one of the trees on the right that you always swerved towards to avoid slamming into the playground fence. (I loved sledding into that little copse, a word I learned in seventh grade I think when I was first taking Latin, and we learned sylvia.) You would go as far as you could into the deeper, warmer, snow, presided over by the dark warmth-gathering trees.) I was sitting in front of Igo and he steered us (it may have been his first time on a sled) under a branch which whipped me over the eye and drew blood. He felt terrible and fearful going back upstairs (I don't know if this was the first time he had met my mother), but she was fine about it, and I was too, though I remember a bandage.

Ah, no, I couldn't have been over eight, since this was in the old apartment, 2-G (I remember Igo explaining things to my mother in the hallway), and we moved to 7-F when I was eight. So I noticed acne already at eight.

I remember also how they explained to me that it was summer in Sao Paulo when winter in New York, and vice versa. (They showed me on my axis-tilted globe, but I think this was before Igo's visit, or maybe well-after, when they repeated the lesson. I don't know when I got the globe, but I remember mu shock when playing, probably with Hugh, we caved part of it in, and it turned out to be made of very sturdy cardboard. This entrance we breached to the underworld, I think near Iceland, is part of my general memory of it now.) But I remember that Igo told me that even in the winter, he never had to wear more than a sweater there, like the one he was wearing (inside) as he told me this.

posted by william 4:44 PM
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