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 25, 2007

I remember how black it was in Sharon when we would get up in the morning to go to school. We got up at 6:00 to get to the bus for 7:00. I remember that it made no difference if you opened the shades or kept them closed: the only light was yellow, incandescent. The dark made the house feel colder. I never set out my clothes the night before. I remember in second grade, after we moved to Shaorn, I had a pair of school shoes, for once, that I liked: navy blue ballet flats with a bow at the top. I think Leah Schachter had similar shoes, and I loved her and loved to have anything in common with her.

I remember bad days in first grade: the day my crayons melted, being last to finish the red workbook, the day I got chicken pox, the last-minute struggle to find the right kind of black, ruled notebook. But second grade feels more obscure; The quality of the light in these memories is off, a green-tinted glare on everything. For Hebrew, we had that Israeli teacher, Shoshana Cohen, who made us copy long poems in script off the board. For English, we had Ms. Simansky, who had beautiful red curly hair and freckles and a soft lovely voice [the color of the memories changes here: she is in the light, always in daylight, in the sunlight standing in the doorway to her classroom, standing between the shadowy corridor and her big windows to the yard], and who was altogether what you would want a teacher to be: beautiful, kind, upright--she could speak gently to lions and dissuade them from roaring. She made us work in groups on contractions: haven't, isn't, couldn't, won't. I didn't like the group: two boys and two girls. Massa was the other girl, but I don't remember who the boys were. She read _Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing_ to us, and Elisheva, who wore her long dark hair in a ponytail tied at the nape of her neck and pinned it up on her head, neat and straight as a stripe, drew such a good likeness of the real cover on her book report that we all agreed she was our artist. I had a crush on Dani Stein in those days, and I remember looking at the months of the year train, posted across the top of a wall, with our birthdays on them; I remember, but I could be wrong, that Dani's was in April.

Ms. Simanski made us learn verses by heart, but I never learned anything by heart willingly--not then and not in third grade when we had to learn the times tables by heart and I didn't, wouldn't, learned it only piecemeal, over time, learning each number through use, figuring them out one at a time. I probably had the nine times tables by the time I was in 5th grade. I could probably fill in the boxes in that grid (1-9 along the top, 1-9 along the side) in seven minutes now, but I couldn't do it then, and I suppose I only know the twelve times tables now because I've had to do a lot of measuring in inches over the years. The parts of the day in which other kids learned these things were invisible to me. Or I couldn't bring myself to care.

Anyway, the only poem I remember learning that year, second grade, was by Robert Louis Stevenson: The rain is raining all around / It falls on field and tree / The rain is raining on umbrellas/ here and fish at sea. I'm not sure, come to think of it, where the line break is between ll. 3-4. I learned that one because Leah Schachter and I sat together on the bus on the way home from school and we practiced it, and we sang a bunch of affecting songs from Annie (Maybe far away, and maybe real nearby . . . ), and then I made up a tune for the Stevenson poem, and we sang that the rest of the way home.

posted by Rosasharn 2:12 PM
. . . 0 comments

Wednesday, October 17, 2007

I remember, for the first time in decades, commendations! We got them in first and second grade. (Mrs. Comiskey, our second grade teacher, had a name that I thought was related to commendations.) They were obviously important, but they were purely abstract. They weren't stars or anything. They were just something you got for being good, as though stored up in some scholastic abstract treasury. But we thought they were important. I think this was my first introduction to abstraction. It was fascinating without my quite knowing that I was fascinated. (Fascination was an abstraction as well, so commendation led to the whole ramifying set of abstraction.)

posted by william 7:10 PM
. . . 0 comments

Thursday, October 11, 2007

I remember Hurricane Gloria. I remember staying home from school and the excitement of waiting for something incredible--something hard to believe: Would or could this imaginary adult storm knock down the stand of creaking old oaks just south of the house? If they fell, would they crash down on us--how could they not? I remember my mother filling huge five gallon glass jars full of water, and possibly the bathtub, and jittery trips up and down stairs to the basement; did we really have to stay down there? We couldn't. I don't remember losing power, though I do remember big quiet calm, so probably we did. I remember standing in the kitchen, looking out the window into the woods, watching a huge black chestnut tree go down. It fell as if in slow motion, gently, swishing across my field of vision from left to right, and never made a sound until it thumped to the ground and the house shook a little. Feeling it fall amazed me, how invisibly the wind tore it up, singled it out among all the trees in the forest, but more than that, I gaped at the roots that had ripped out of the ground, 15 or 20 feet into the air, pulled up by the weight of their own tree. Whenever I tried to explain what I had seen, I had to use two hands: My left arm up, fingers splayed as the tree's canopy, my right hand below the left elbow, fingers spread for roots, rising as the left arm folded. We had no swing set or jungle gym, and for the next few years, until my parents finally got someone to come and chainsaw those long branches, my brother and I played on that great, horizontal tree.

posted by Rosasharn 12:35 PM
. . . 0 comments

I remember Jeanne Dixon's autobiography A Gift for Prophecy. I remember the cover of her book was printed in purple! Everyone was reading it in fourth grade. Or not everyone, but the most unexpected people. It was neat to stand in lines and see other kids I never talked to, to see girls, lost in the same book I was absorbed in, all of us so interested that we were reading it as we lined up before school. It was as though a gigantic version one of my uptown grandmother's pearl-drop veils had been dropped over the school, with the drops being the kids scattered everywhere feverishly reading the book. (I remember one girl whom I had a sense of as being vaguely aloof reading the book too, and this humanized her for me a little. It was nice to see in her too what reading was for me: a kind of wanting.)

posted by william 9:23 AM
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