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 11, 2008

I remember that Sunday, September 9, 2001 was a beautiful day. We were at the beach. I threw D into the waves several times. The sky was cerulean. When we went to leave a bit of wind kicked up and sand from our towel blew towards another group. The big male in the group, a burly ex-marine (from his tattoos) said "Thanks." A bit of unpleasantness. The next day was D.'s first day of Kindergarten. (I remember about half way through first grade, when I could read, realizing with a kind of puzzled but grateful surprise, that I'd spent the last year in a "garten," not a "garden" -- grateful because I liked that it was European, like my German-speaking uptown grandparents.) He came home excited and happy. Tuesday was a beautiful day when we dropped him off, and talked briefly to his new best friend's parents. Then I drove to school and heard from the departmental secretary, on the cell phone, that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. (I was in the parking lot outside the building, about to take J. to the pediatrician for a check-up.) I thought a small plane, no big deal, like the plane that hit the Empire State Building in the forties. I turned on the radio to hear the plane hit the Pentagon. It was all electric and frightening. At the pediatrician's office everything was silent. We watched the towers collapsed, while he made sure little J. was healthy. I reached my father in the hospital with pneumonia. The night before some self-important orderly had refused to let me speak to him because it was after 8:00 pm. Now they were releasing him because they thought there'd be a huge influx of the injured. So he got home, and then it was eerily quiet in New York too. Everyone in Boston drove with immense courtesy -- how could we ever think violently about each other? I felt bad about the tiff with the guy on the beach and the orderly on the phone. The sky was even more cerulean: no contrails for the next few days. I watched the golf channel for a long time that afternoon, and tried to figure out how much D. had heard and understood. I remember worrying about certain people I knew in the WTC, and also a really good poem by I think Deborah Gottleib Garrison in the New Yorker the next week. No one I worried about died, but people had no idea were there did. I remember going with mixed feelings to Montrachet, in Tribecca, for dinner on my birthday two months later -- we were supporting businesses, and it was good, but you could still smell smoke everywhere. I remember my wonderful,.sweet, committed student Bob M, whose picture I saw in the Times a few weeks later.

posted by william 11:50 AM
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