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

Saturday, December 31, 2005

I remember a song from my record of songs which I played on my orange phonograph: "Sound off!" "ONE TWO" "Sound off!" "THREE FOUR" After that it modulates in my memory to "Three Blind Mice," and then, "Pop goes the weasel," which I think I had on another record.

posted by william 4:25 PM
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Tuesday, December 20, 2005

I remember that during the last transit strike people driving just stopped and picked people up going their direction, and how odd it was that trust (both ways) should rise in proportion to animosity (between the strikers and the city).

posted by william 7:57 AM
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Sunday, December 18, 2005

I remember the first time I remember trying not to fall asleep when I was supposed not to fall asleep. I was babysitting for some people I didn't know so well, on the other side of the building. The children had gone to bed, but it was getting late, and I was lying on the rug in their living room waiting for them to come home. I fell asleep, woke up, determined myself to stay up, fell asleep again, and woke up to their return. I don't know whether they knew that I'd been asleep or not -- and of course it would have been fine if they did; but somehow I didn't know that. I do remember the pleasure of getting paid on the spot, though.

posted by william 8:33 AM
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Tuesday, December 13, 2005

I remember how many things that I first saw in cartoons turned out to be real. Mice in the house, for example. A lot of them seemed like cartoon inventions. In particular snow-shoes. The large, netted platforms seemed delightfully ridiculous. I remember seeing them in some Warner Brothers cartoon -- I think Daffy Duck. Then the one time I went hunting (failing to hit anything), the cabin we stayed in overnight had snowshoes hanging on the wall. I was really surprised they existed. What else would turn out to be true?

posted by william 1:06 PM
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Thursday, December 08, 2005

I remember sitting in Johnny's Big Red Grill, in Ithaca, with several friends when Paul R. came in to say that John Lennon had been shot. Someone had ordered French Fries with vinegar. We got them to go to the news on the bar TV, but that was pretty much all we knew. A couple of hours later we heard that he was dead. The next day I heard that one of the cops taking him to the hospital asked, "Are you John Lennon?" and he groaned and said "Yeah." And then he was DOA.

posted by william 11:37 PM
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Wednesday, December 07, 2005

I remember seeing prostitutes waiting on corners as I walked uptown on Broadway. I remember one with a white, feathery mantilla, smoking and looking beautiful (probably she wouldn't look beautiful to me now) and authoritative, but without any self-possession. I think that's because they also looked so cold, in the early winter dark, so scantily clad. I don't know how I came to recognize that they were prostitutes. They were there most evenings, but their look of waiting was just like that of people I recognized at the bus-stops and lights. But then one evening I realized that they were prostitutes, and it seemed like the opening of a whole new dimension in the neighborhood. Later my father, I think, said something about how they were bad for the neighborhood, or people didn't want them around, or something, and I couldn't understand that, since all they were doing was standing there, just like anyone else.

posted by william 7:13 AM
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Sunday, December 04, 2005

I remember one of those events which to children seem a tragedy. When I was a little girl in Yugoslavia, I dressed like all other little girls (except for Muslim ones). We wore short dresses with a yoke which had a seam across the chest. From the yoke the folds of the dress fell to the hem, without marking the waist. In other words, little girls' dresses were an unglamorous, flatchested version of Empire- style dresses which a Jane Austen heroine might have worn. We also wore lace-up shoes up to the ankle. My mother was particularly insistent that I wear those, thinking that I would end up with thinner ankles when I grew up. I remember having scuffed brown ones for every day and fancy ones consisting of black patent leather at the botton and soft gray leather at the top.

At any rate, when we ran away from Sarajevo for good, in 1941, we first went to Split, on the Adriatic. We rented a room from a widow with two sons, on whom I promply developed a crush. I tended to prefer Drago, the older, who might then have been 19, and whom I considered more interesting and more suitable to my own age of close to 10; but the younger, Miro, aged 15, was also acceptable. My mother had a dress made for me which for the first time marked the waist. I put it on, feeling grown up and glamorous, and looking forward to the admiration of the boys when they got home. My elation was short-lived, though. My mother insisted that I wear my usual lace-up shoes even though, by that time, I had also acquired a pair of shoes like Mary Janes, the height of sophistication. No amount of begging would sway my mother. I think I was too embarrassed to tell her of my sentimental problems and finally had to obey her. I don't think I have ever hated an item of clothing as much as those lace-up shoes which, in my mind, fairly screamed "Child!" I am really amused now by young girls' choice of work boots which look a lot like my old nemesis, though some have platforms.

posted by alma 9:54 PM
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I remember the pleasure of warming my hands at the tensor lamp. I would come home from the cold outside, and it would already have been dark a while, or at least it felt as though my room had been dark for a long time. In the winter I wouldn't see it in the light after school and the park, but only come home to its darkness, as though the cold were inside my room as well. But I'd turn on the desk lamp, and feel a kind of safety within my room itself in its cone of light. The light would illuminate my hand, first one, then the other, and I liked the feel of time having stopped as I held my hand under the light, and felt the warmth of the light itself in the chill air of my room. Time meant something like the oscillating rhythm of the warming and cooling of the ambience, the radiators steaming and changing the atmosphere. But my room was just chilly, and yet my hand was warming in the constancy of the light, and I loved the sense of light radiating implacably outward from the lamp, with no sense of modulation, therefore of time at all.

posted by william 12:56 PM
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Thursday, December 01, 2005

I remember my world map jigsaw, and being especially fascinated by the new water bodies, or rather, by their names: Bering, Euphrates, Sutlej, Gibraltar. I remember the watermark on the puzzle that said something to the effect of Britannia Rules the Waves. I remember being surprised that Tunisia was not in Australia, and that Singapore was not in India, because that's where the names seemed to belong. I remember looking for a place named Peking, and thinking it was a product of my imagination when I didn't find it.

posted by sravana 12:14 AM
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