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, December 21, 2007

I remember some hybrid illustrated coloring books that involved a scroll that you spun under a clear and flimsy clear plastic window. You colored on the window, so that you could erase it when you scrolled up another page. It was really interesting as a piece of cheapo technology, but nothing about the content was interesting and it didn't work anyhow. Now my main sense of it is that it jammed and bunched up in the cylindrical canisters where the rollers were and unspooled and went crooked. I think it was more a conveyer belt than a scroll -- that is it went around again to the beginning. But I may be confusing two similar toys, since I also remember that feeling of forcing it when you scrolled it out to the end, and the glue coming undone from the roller.

posted by william 10:56 AM
. . . 0 comments

Thursday, December 13, 2007

I remember a snow day when my mother took us to sled on Pettee's hill. So many kids were there, swooping down that hill. A hill the shape of a normal distribution curve: such a long sharp way down, with a slow evening out to flat right there at the end. I couldn't believe it. How was this place set aside for sledding, for kids, and how did everyone know about it? Was this permanent or only on snow days? What was this hill for in summer? We sledded and sledded, flying down and trudging back up. It was so fun, I don't remember if I got snow in my boots. Then she pulled us up the hill of the end of Pleasant street, walking right up the middle of the road. Though there were almost no cars on the road, I felt scared and strange--so exposed in the middle of the road and so low to the ground, invisible and craning to see what was coming. The snow was so thick on the roads that there were deep ruts where tires had tried to move. It was hard going, walking, but a dream on a sled.

The two favorite things I loved best about childhood were: 1. The instantaneous alliances that play made possible with kids whose names you didn't even know. [When do adults make such alliances? Is this what one night stands are really about?] 2. The feeling of total belovedness brought on by unexpected permission and by hot cocoa.

posted by Rosasharn 9:50 AM
. . . 0 comments

Wednesday, December 05, 2007

I remember how fascinated I was by the whirlpool of water going down the drain in the bathtub. I'd sit watching it all drain out. I connected the beaded chain of the plug to its image in the water once the plug was pulled, the dancing downwards pointed elongation.

I remember this experience was disturbing and even frightening when I was very young. The way opening the drain could dimple the top of the water several inches above it. The dancing dervish seemed to me like a malevolent spirit which just showed up as the water left -- which therefore could show up at will. The water seemed innocent to me, harried by the whirlpool dervish. Finally it would all be gone, but with a loud draining sound that seemed a slightly monitory echo.

Often my mother would swoop me out of the tub before I had to experience much of the whirlpool, and her counterpull into a towel and love would completely compensate for the anxiety caused by the draining water. She had power even over that.

(I remember that at my uptown grandparents, though, the water drained even faster, the whirlpool was even more pronounced, and I really didn't like taking baths there.)

posted by william 11:17 AM
. . . 0 comments

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