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

Monday, October 16, 2006

I remember refusing to wear sandals without socks. On my left foot and foreleg, I have and had a pretty big hemangioma, and I hated it. I wanted so much to be symmetrical. I remember drawing on my right foot with purple marker to try to even things out. I remember the bitter realization that I loved toenail polish on my right foot, that toenail polish made the right foot glamorous, grownup, perfect, but that even with toenail polish, the left foot could never be redeemed. I remember refusing to go outside without socks on, knee socks on in the heat, and my father calling me in from upstairs, calling me in off the street, sitting down with me and talking me out of the socks. I don't remember what he said, but I do remember sitting on his lap and crying.

I remember walking with my mother along Mass Ave by the new bus depot, crossing the street, making up rhymes about the unfortunate foot and the kinds of questions people asked me about it:

Did you go into the kichen with a very careless cook?
Did you get jam on it or other sticky gook?
Did some purple bugs come sit there for a look?

And there was one about kicking a train, or something like that. I don't remember it. I remember sitting down and writing out each of the rhymes on half a folded piece of paper, and illustrating them. On the front I wrote, "Roz's You and Foot Book" in big letters, and decorated the title with flowers. My parents photocopied the pages, stapled them into booklets, and I colored in some of the copies. My first publication.

posted by Rosasharn 8:06 PM
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