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

Sunday, April 26, 2009

I remember Ken H. knowing that if we rolled a bottle down the big hill on 91st street, it would shatter after just a few revolutions. I thought it would just roll, and maybe shatter purely by chance. But for him it was a technique -- roll and shatter. He took a Coke bottle and rolled it fairly gently, and sure enough it shattered into shards in less then two seconds.

posted by william 11:09 PM
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Friday, April 24, 2009

I remember going to my friend Geoffrey's house, and seeing a pure white marble chess set on their coffee table. Each of the sixty-four squares was white; each of the thirty-two pieces was white. I was puzzled, but then Geoff said that it was the chess set that John and Yoko and just given Bobby Fischer (who'd recently beat Spassky).

This seemed very cool to me. Thinking back now I see the coolness in several different ways. I was a better chess player than Geoff, but suddenly he had this great set, which I thought of as his, not his parents'. He had a great ability to seem to be his family's representative, to have all their weight and authority and insight behind him. I never felt that way about my family, but the S's were magical. Not their mother so much: she seemed the one who was not quite part of the rest of them. And because I liked worshiping Geoff, and didn't want to feel superior in any way, it was nice that now he suddenly had a more privileged relationship to chess than I did.

And at the same time that it helped boost one aspect of Geoff, the set boosted my view of Yoko. Since it was obvious to me that this was Yoko's kind of idea, not an idea that the Beatles would have. (Because it's only now that I see the chess set was an allusion to the White Album. Which I remember was white because the naked photos on the British version were banned in the United States.) We all hated Yoko for breaking up the Beatles, for fooling John into thinking her art was more interesting than the Beatles were. But here was this great chess set, and this new grouping: John, Yoko, Bobby Fischer! That was pretty grand.

And of course the grouping also included the S's, since they had the chess set. The chess set? Of course not. But somehow the world of commodities they lived in included things like this chess set. They could buy from the same cosmic store that John and Yoko could. They belonged to a kind of social Platonic realm, where the objects that people owned were works of art -- where you could just buy a work of art. So it turned out that what gave the art its aura wasn't that it was unique, but that it was an appurtenance of a transcendent social realm to which we sublunary types did not belong. But the S's did belong, and so did John and Yoko and Bobby Fischer, and the group they made up was almost as wonderful as the Beatles, and the S's at any rate lived just next door.

posted by william 5:41 PM
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Friday, April 17, 2009

I remember the pleasure and luxury of things that were lit up at night. Walking past a garden with spotlights (unlit), I remember visiting restaurants or houses for dinner where the lawns were impeccable and the lights nestled in the grass made it possible to see that. I remember that when guests were over for dinner, my parents turned on every light downstairs, and replaced the inevitably dead one or two bulbs in the chandelier. (And how the chandelier gradually lost arms over the years from six to two.)

I remember returning in the evening to the Lalita Mahal hotel in Mysore, and seeing it perfectly white and illuminated from a distance. And I was always excited about flying at night for the view (although I now fairly dislike it for its association with long international flights and leaving home).

posted by sravana 1:06 AM
. . . 0 comments

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

I remember that I wasn't really puzzled by the fact that burglars didn't use fire escapes.

There were a lot of them in my grandmother's neighborhood in Washington Heights, but none in our neighborhood. It was like a different ecological region, with different flora: lower buildings, many with awnings, and most with fire escapes.

I assumed that using them really was cheating. I didn't even articulate this assumption to myself until I read a Batman comic where (as I recall) someone disguised as Batman was breaking into buildings. Batman figured out that he used his cape -- his counterfeit cape -- to lasso the bottom of the fire escape ladder and pull it down. That was when I first somehow realized that adults couldn't reach up to the ladder, and that it was held nearly horizontal by a counterweight (which I saw clearly depicted in the frame of the comic). I had just sort of assumed that they were fixed structures, like anything else.

The fact that they weren't made me obscurely sad: some trust went out of the background of the world. It wasn't perfectly still and stable, its use and status unanimously agreed to. It was designed to frustrate some people and to protect others. We weren't all at one about the world we lived in.

posted by william 2:11 PM
. . . 0 comments

Saturday, April 04, 2009

I remember thinking "musician" and "magician" were the same word. I didn't have the concept musician, and so I heard all mentions of musicians as being about magicians. One day they told me that my second cousin, a musician, would be coming to dinner at my downtown grandmother's house with us. I was very disappointed when I found out the truth.

posted by william 1:44 PM
. . . 1 comments

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