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

Monday, September 22, 2008

I remember Yankee Stadium. I remember the first game I saw there. My father took me. Hugh's father had taken us to Shea to see the red-hot Mets (Gary Genry pitching), and the Yankees then were terrible. But still, you had to see them, and Yankee Stadium was somehow more authentic than Shea (though I wouldn't have put it that way at the time), more about the stands than Shea which just offered a utilitarian, function-following form structure for seeing the field. I remember that we sat under a deck in Yankee Stadium -- we had good seats that my father's firm got from one of their clients -- and that Joe Pepitone was playing first, and Bobby Murcer was in center. I remember that the Yankees lost. The game was in itself of very little interest. But my father showed me how the catcher backed up first on grounders. I remember a dropped third strike and the catcher tagging the batter, or maybe throwing him out at first. I remember Pepitone lost his hat on one play, and you could see his impressive sideburns, and that somehow made him more real than he was on TV, whereas everyone else was less real, reduced only to their names and numbers, not to the faces that you could sort of see on the screen. I remember that it was interesting that you could hear the umpire (you couldn't on TV in those days), though I may have already noticed this in Shea. I remember my father explaining that the umpire called strikes, but said nothing for balls, so the players had to count for themselves. It was a beautiful day and the park was very big, and the crowd was huge. It wasn't magical, the way baseball stadiums sometimes are, but it was real, the way baseball games never are on TV.

I remember going to a game with Steve Shaviro (what felt like) many years later, when Tommy John was pitching, and a guy behind us yelling incessantly, "Escrew the ball, Tommy! Escrew the ball!" The Yankees won that night -- this would have been July of 1980.

posted by william 7:02 AM
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