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

Thursday, October 19, 2006

I remember leaving the camp social early so that I could be up to see the hot air balloon festival. The fantasy of the social--that we would get dressed up and go to the ball, that like Cinderella we'd be recognized for the hidden beauty usually masked by our clumsy, clunky, everyday selves. Unlike the wicked stepsisters, our whole bunk was in it together. In the hours after dinner and before the social, strange alliances arose. Girls who never normally spoke put up one another's hair. We shared blow-dryers. We voted on each other's outfits. Even the squeamish took off their glasses and put in contact lenses, exchanged application tips and makeup, and drew on blue, green, brown, black, grey, or purple eyeliner. We had all seen those John Hughes movies, so we knew how it worked: you were your undesirable, ordinary self until some opportunity or crisis (in our case, the social) arose and then you transformed into a different, truer version and found yourself loved by the one you liked best. Apparent losers had the most to gain, but somehow their stylishness became a cause for the cool girls, a measure of their power to transform, their ability to become Pygmalion or, for us, Molly Ringwald in The Breakfast Club.

With regret, I left the ball with my mother before midnight, before finding a prince of any kind, and dutifully went to bed. In the cold before dawn I dressed in a new long-sleeved dark rose dress made of sweatshirt material. It kept me almost warm as I stood on the hill in the shocking chill, watching with my family as the balloons and the sun came up. I was thrilled to see them, felt myself heated and alight and floating as one by one they ripped their colors away from the grass, up past the trees, brightly up into the colorless sky.

posted by Rosasharn 11:54 AM
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