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

Wednesday, May 17, 2006

I remember kites. I remember trying to put a kite together, once in New York, once in Stormville. I knew, vaguely and from Peanuts, that they were supposed to have tails. I didn't understand the principle of the knots, nor their length, nor why they needed one at all. I remember slotting the light wooden frame together, the pleasure of that flossing-feeling of sudden success when the string got pulled into the notch, but that the tail wasn't included. How was one supposed to make one? Of what? And the kite didn't fly without it. In fact I didn't successfully fly a kite until college. I remember that box kites seemed more solid, but that the box kites sold at Connie's, the general store in Stormville where we got all our balsa airplanes and candy cigarettes, were much too expensive.

But I did successfully fly these silver, flexible plastic bird- or plane-like kites with revolving wings that the wind would spin, helping them aloft, in Milano Maritima. They didn't need tails, and they seemed perfectly designed to fly, unlike kites. We used to fly them way up high over the beach. I remember many beach chairs with tanning adults lying on them, the string reels plunged into the sand or tied around the frame of the beach chair as the bird glinted merrily far up above. I remember one father showing us how to "send a message" up to the kite, taking a piece of paper and tying it in a simple knot around the string at the bottom where we were holding the reel. The paper just climbed up the string all the way, which I thought was amazing, amazing.

But not so amazing as to make me stop wondering what the message to this inanimate, unmanned kite could possibly be. Somehow, it seemed, the message would be relevant to the kite, now that it was in another sphere, one that was inaccessible to us. It mattered that it could only reach the kite as a message. But what else could it convey? I still wonder, sometimes.

posted by william 4:14 PM
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