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, May 28, 2007

I remember the colorful gypsy cabs that used to cruise in New York. Like yellow cabs, they had prices stenciled on their doors, but they were different colors -- green and purple pre-eminently. I didn't know they were different from yellow cabs until I was old enough to take cabs. By then I'd read that they were dangerous and uninsured (and also that it was illegal for any car registered in New York but a licensed taxi to be painted yellow). They were livery, but not allowed to cruise for fares, which of course they did. I took them once in a while, though by then, as well, they were scarcer than they had been. The only time I really remember taking one, I was surprised by how dilapidated the swaying back seat was. The cab had a meter that didn't work. Yellow cabs had just started putting partitions up between passengers and driver; the gypsy cabs hadn't done that.

posted by william 11:27 PM
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Friday, May 25, 2007

I remember the basketball courts south of 79th street in Riverside Park. The Promenade ends on 81st street (at the monument to the 6,000,000 Jews killed by the Nazis), then there's a downhill (where I fell once when my father was teaching me to ride a bike) and an uphill, and then you have to cross 79th to continue in the park, and that's where some basketball courts are. A fair number, actually, so the teenagers and people in their twenties played there, unlike at the one or two hoops I vaguely recall farther uptown. This was playground ball, shirts vs. skins, and they were all really good. Early on days that we had no school, we could play there too, and I remember going there with Peter Obstler, his friend who went to my school with equally long hair whose name I can't recall, and Billy Kaplan, though I'm not sure Billy was there. Maybe it was Eric Bendetson? Anyhow, what I remember is that some of these hoops had chain "nets" that were singularly unlovely. They didn't come down as far as the string nets at our school, which I could touch by leaping. (I remember that phase: how high you could jump measured against hoop, backboard, and net.) Most of the hoops didn't have any nets though. I remember also -- I wonder if the dimensions are subtly changed now -- the way basketballs would sometimes get jammed between the square bracket holding the hoop and the backboard. And I remember trying to shoot the ball with just the right touch to land it on the bracket, so that someone would have to throw something up or leap up and grab the net and shake to get the ball to come down again.

posted by william 1:22 PM
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Saturday, May 19, 2007

I remember that the adults -- my parents and grandparents -- got to carry around umbrellas when it rained. I had to wear my yellow raincoat and hat, but umbrellas (like those nylon beach chaises-longues) were an adult accessory only. I remember it was slightly mysterious to me how they opened and shut, and also the kind of conclave they made outside our front door in the hallway when my grandparents visited on a rainy day, opened to dry and tilted at a 30 degree angle, inscrutable but friendly in the way they waited there with their perfect posture and deportment, clustered serenely around the entrance mat, part of adult knowledge and practice. The rain was part of what I thought of as city life (unlike the parks and playgrounds) -- the life of offices and taxis and business phone calls and mail and checks -- that was my parents' other life and expertise, and the umbrellas were, like the adults and their clients and partners, also calmly expert in conducting that life, the life of the rain.

posted by william 9:14 AM
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Wednesday, May 16, 2007

I remember a kid appearing on Bob Barker's "Truth or Consequences," I think he was a science prodigy, maybe eleven or nine (older than I at any rate), who described the enormous air pressure that pressed down upon us. It made me very impressed with my own (and all of humanity's) Superman-like strength.

posted by william 7:50 AM
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Monday, May 14, 2007

I remember that someone brought in an oscilloscope to our fourth or fifth grade class. It might have been a teacher, or maybe a parent at the behest of a teacher. I think we saw it in the lobby where we lined up every morning and had recess in bad weather, and had our class pictures taken. I remember that the teacher explained that it displayed sounds on a screen -- a round, graphed screen like the radar screens from old movies. (In movies now radar screens seem more updated; I hated the way everything they detected vanished right after the sweep, and couldn't see how air-traffic controllers kept track of these disappearing blips.) We talked into it, and the sounds we made were turned into a thin, jagged, uninteresting line. It was chastening to think that all our talk turned into this tenuous and information-poor graph. I think though that I projected that feeling on to a kind of disappointment at the machine itself, which could only get that nugatory scribble out of the human voices of my friends, voices that were saying meaningful things; but more meaningful still, voices I could recognize as containing all the richness of their presence.

posted by william 8:30 AM
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Tuesday, May 08, 2007

I remember the thrill of my mother opening the rarely-opened cupboard in my room. Our baby-record diaries, carefully filled out for some pages (immunization, footprints, first words), but mostly empty. I wished I could complete them. Photo albums of my parents' vacations pre-me -- Kashmir most distinctly, perhaps also Ooty and Mysore -- and of my first two years, which were all alluring in their being from a time before my memory, and being mostly locked away. (All other photographs were at my grandmothers', on open shelves, so I naturally took them for granted.)

Although I looked at the Kashmir photos every chance I got, I don't remember now any details of scenery. Lots of mountains, of course, and I think I remember what my mother wore. But I remember sensing its extreme distance -- geographically as well as its lack of resemblance to anywhere I'd been to, the feeling that the insurgencies, starting as they did only a little after I was born, would not end for a very long time, and the fact that my parents were there only two years before I was born and that I had hence just missed it.

And it made me sadder to have the albums locked up, because the photographs were the only claim I had to any memory, past or future, of the place. I was afraid the cupboard would lose them.

posted by sravana 9:47 PM
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Wednesday, May 02, 2007

I remember posting about the Claremont stables almost five years to the day before they closed last Sunday. It was fun to be in that cavernous space in New York, in a building that otherwise looked ordinary. But inside was a paddock filled with dirt, and horses, and hay, and light coming in, caught by dust that seemed very old. Now it's gone.

posted by william 10:57 PM
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