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, September 27, 2007

I remember, from the marquee of The New Yorker theater, "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" and (later I believe) the Lennie Bruce movie.

I was surprised and intrigued by "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf." I liked it that adults turned out to like fairy tales as well. But I didn't quite get why the Big Bad Wolf should be female. There was some level of sophistication about the adult version of the fairy tale that I was aware of but unable to imagine. I kind of had a picture of adults enjoying the movie and enjoying fairy-tale fright the way I'd enjoyed the dramatization of Browning's "Pied Piper" at Town Hall when my father took me to it. I also sort of imagined my teachers -- the ones who read to us in class (so I must have been in first or second grade) -- as the audience to a movie like this.

(I didn't know that Woolf was not how you spelled the name of the animal, and misspelled it a lot since then because of that marquee. Things were probably complicated by the fact that there was a kid in my class named Michael Wolfe. I am just realizing only now how witty it was that he was given the role of the king of the wolves in our class play, one of the five major roles -- I was one of the rank and file wolves. The teachers must have loved giving him that role.)

posted by william 9:04 AM
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Wednesday, September 26, 2007

I remember learning the word endorse> from Ronnie Rogers, who used it a lot when he was paling around with the teachers so impressively in seventh grade. It was one of the common words in his joke routines. He'd seek endorsement or offer endorsement to some teacher.

And I remember thinking that the verb bump, which I remember my mother using, was funny. Later I remember being told not to sit around like "a bump on a log" and that wasn't as funny. I wasn't sure what a bump on a log was, but I did know that it wasn't a good thing to ignore her when you were the bump and she the rebuker of sloth.

posted by william 12:23 AM
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Sunday, September 23, 2007

I remember -- I think when I changed schools -- seeing kids eating cut-up orange slices. We never ate our oranges except after peeling them, and we always peeled them in their spherical state.

posted by william 8:02 AM
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Monday, September 17, 2007

I remember being stuck in elevators. The new elevator in our building, with its office-building feel, had no window. The old one had a round porthole that looked very old-fashioned (my uptown grandmother's also had a round porthole but my downtown grandmother's, in the new buildings in Chelsea, were windowless.) But in both elevators being stuck between floors felt like being in limbo. For some reason the new elevator also had a stop button that you pulled out. I vaguely imagined this would save you if the cable broke. The alarm on the new one was a regular button. On the old one it was a particular button different from the elevator buttons which stood out from the wall and which you depressed till they touched the panel.

Anyhow, I got stuck at least once in the old one (and pressed the alarm button first once or twice and then repeatedly -- it was then I learned that the doorman (Al) heard the alarm from the elevator and not through some system which lit up the switchboard or the like. In the new one I got stuck with some adults -- two older women as I recall and a young adult man. He forced the door open between floors and climbed up and out.

Although I knew from service elevators with their grills and also from European lifts what the floor looked like at shoulder height, it was very strange to see the opaque door forced open and to find that we were actually in a physical place, between floors -- strange since I thought of floors as self-contained and separate regions which you could take stairs to, of course, but which elevators linked only by going from one to the other without any spatial transition. Motion and time, but not space, were the mode of transition. Even in the grill elevators at Congregation B'nai Jeshurun, the blankness of the wall between floors made it seem that we weren't actually moving through space. But now this guy was climbing up and out. Someone else in the elevator -- maybe one of the older women, maybe another kid -- said this was dangerous, and I intuited why. But the most surprising thing was that you could force open an elevator door between floors.

posted by william 11:00 PM
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Monday, September 03, 2007

I remember how interesting I found the toothmarks I could make in my arm. I remember that the palm-down-side of my forearm (no doubt there's a technical name for this) took the best impressions -- no hair there -- but that it was somehow more interesting to press my teeth into the top of my forearm (so my tongue experienced the texture of my hair), even though I could really only get my upper teeth there. None of this was destructive or self-mutilating: it never hurt. It was just an exploration of what I was physically made of, and what was interesting was the fact that I could take impressions like wax, and then as with wax or sand they would disappear. The same was true with scratching a rough rock on my thigh, not too hard. I liked the rough white tracks it left, and how I couldn't tell if they were rock or epidermis, and the fact that you could write or draw with them (which of course you couldn't with your teeth, though I'd sometimes try to leave interesting tooth patterns, as though of a nonhuman creature with many sets of teeth).

posted by william 8:00 AM
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Saturday, September 01, 2007

I remember the words I would fill in for "I Me Mine," wryly thinking of myself as wryly thinking of myself as wryly humorous:
Joy to the Earth!
I me mine I me mine I me mine.
We want...a playoff berth.
I me mine I me mine I me mine

(Of course my subvocalization of playoff had to rush and slur it.) The Mets and the Knicks were much on my mind at the time, and I guess my relation to the Beatles was sort of like my relation to sports teams: groups that worked together and that combined expertise with an appealing vulnerability, felt in the way I knew the players individually (unlike the players in rival groups), a vulnerability that made me love them.

posted by william 1:08 PM
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