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

Friday, June 22, 2007

I remember that one time coming home from school, one of the kids said we should go sneak into a garage on 89th street, I think between Broadway and Amsterdam. He'd done it before, and said it was fun. The garage was down a little curved ramp that reminded me of the ramp to Hugh's courtyard, which we took his go-kart down. We went in and there were some geezers working there and one of them started yelling at us as though he knew us, but obviously he only knew the instigator. He told him that he'd warned him not to come back, and he unleashed a dog on us. A dog! A little terrier, a miniature! At first this seemed hilarious, but the dog came racing up the ramp towards us, barking insanely and nipping at us. I remember pulling back and up in that sort of torero stance, my body arched away from the jumping dog when it caught up to me as I was running back up the ramp. It felt very graceful, even my shins arcing back from where my feet were on the ground, planted there so that I couldn't be running at the same time. And the little terrier bit my shin, drew blood, and I had tooth marks and cuts there for the next few days, and it itched a lot. The dog circled madly, no doubt to resume the attack, but we raced up the ramp and excaped. I think I was the only one who'd got bitten. I didn't know whether to tell my parents -- I assumed that the fact that the garage owned the dog meant that it was in the control of authorities and didn't have rabies. I knew from Hugh that rabies took a long time to manifest itself, so I had a while to think about telling them, and then I just forgot.

But in college, Tad, who was kind of the Hugh-figure of college life, said one day in conversation that rabies could actually take forever. I'd thought you were in the clear after six months -- I think I thought this because we'd read a book on Pasteur, and how he innoculated someone who'd been ravaged by rabid dogs and this person survived, which impressed everyone. But Tad said that he'd heard of someone who got rabies years after being bitten. So I started worrying again, a little bit. It felt like a long time in psychological time between middle school and college, but I realized it was well within in the window that Tad had, alas, opened. That too faded, though.

posted by william 9:53 AM
. . . 0 comments

Wednesday, June 13, 2007

I remember that the dock in Bellagio was painted dark green -- is this called olive green? -- and that the raft was also green with lots of peeling paint. I remember this, suddenly, vividly, and from great depths because I remember that I was surprised by the docks on Long Island, a few years later. They weren't painted, and I was surprised that the wood itself had the quality of peeling paint -- rough, splintery, unpredictable. This must have be due to the salt water there, but I didn't expect it: I thought of wood as being like the wood of our floors or the table or our school desks or even the picnic tables at Bear Mountain or in Stormville -- smooth and pliable, with a lot of give. The benches in Riverside Park could give you splinters, I guess, but that also felt like an effect of peeling paint, as though the paint were pulling bits of wood off with it when it came off. On Long Island though it was the wood itself, and this was a surprising discovery, the disconnect between what the docks looked like from afar and the actual experience you had of them when you walked on them. The people who knew them -- Michael C's father especially -- who owned boats and walked barefoot on them with their fishing tackle had a kind of expertise which made them unsurprised by the roughness of the wood, and which made the roughness of the wood the signal of that expertise, so that that wood took on a prestige for me different from the pointlessly well-painted but now peeling dock in Bellagio.

posted by william 4:35 PM
. . . 0 comments

Tuesday, June 12, 2007

I remember that I used to hate the way the white-on-green banner of letters and numerals above the blackboard in our class showed the numeral 3, sort of like this -- Ʒ -- with its top loop replaced by an acute angle. It seemed unlovely, the beautiful symmetry and smoothness of the two parts of the numeral broken, the top turned into a sort of flattened shard which made the number itself seem unfamiliar, unfriendly, out of affinitity with the capital E it mirrored and balanced (especially the way I wrote the E myself). It was as though the bottom left sharp angle of the 2 had been wrenched out of place, or as though the sharpness of the numeral 2 had invaded the familiar friendliness of the 3.

posted by william 4:48 PM
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