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, May 31, 2009
I remember the white plastic T-shaped tags that attached the stoppers of waterguns to their bodies when you filled them. They were always in the way -- they made the guns much harder to fill, especially with hoses, so I never felt that my watergun was satisfactorily full. By pulling hard you could force the T to collapse and fold over and pull the whole thing out, but somehow after that the gun never seemed to seal up quite right.

posted by William 10:52 AM
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Tuesday, May 19, 2009
I remember playing on the Moshav with the Moshav kids. Because these memories are visceral rather than visual, I can't easily describe this; outside. Dry sun on dry blond dirt. Running up and down scrabbly hills. The smell of heat, but also the variegation of sun and shadow as it falls on your back and of speed and breath as we ran, found a hiding place, squeezed and stilled into it, ran again. There were teams, so alliances, secrets, the pleasure of coordination, instant kinship. The memory/ies are conflated: I am four. I am nine. I am a stranger, accepted. I am there with Miri, my friend to be from the Old City. The place is full of siblings and purity, yearning, sweet & genuine spirit, and song. I wonder if we got our Shabbos clothes dirty.

posted by Rosasharn 8:45 PM
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Sunday, May 17, 2009
I remember how much I loved Dr. Greenberg, the kindly principal of the Hebrew and Sunday Schools at B'nai Jeshrun. So much nicer than the rabbi whose first name I shared and who lived in our building. I thought that as authorities at the same place they'd be equally nice, but they weren't. Dr. Greenberg led the junior congregation. I remember being one of the Torah attendants a couple of times, while some of the older people read the Torah. I loved Dr. Greenberg's blessing at the end of the service: "May he cause his countenance to shine upon you and to give you peace." I remember his saying that the lamp above the podium was perpetually lit, which was very impressive to me: I thought about the building in ruins in some future century but people desperately keeping the lamp lit over the rubble anyhow.

Sundays we would sing songs -- I loved

By the Sea of Kinnereth,
Ancient legend declareth,
Stands a palace enchanted,
With woods divinely planted.

Who dwells there? It is only
A lad like a nightingale lonely,
Who with prophets and sages
Studies the Torah's pages.

I was somewhat puzzled about how lonely he could be when attended to in his studies by a retinue of prophets and sages, but on the other hand it seemed right: a young boy, lonely and alone, as he is intensively educated by servant-masters. The song was perfectly calculated for a chid's misunderstanding.

We also did film-strips of Torah stories. He would narrate a picture, and then rap twice with his ring on the metal hand rail to the stage when it was time for the next photo (later I played one of "The Sons" in the Tradition song of Fiddler on the Roof on that stage), In high school, when we did the first two books of Paradise Lost I was regarded as expert on the Bible because I knew those stories so well.

I saw him a few years later -- maybe three or four -- and he had a terrible limp and was wizened and old. This was very puzzling to me, because he already seemed to me to be old -- permanently old and wise and in command of his place in the world -- when I first met him. How could he get older? I think he might have been my first intimation that old people aren't immortal, haven't achieved the eternal stability of their vast accumulation of time. Old people get older and then they die.

I didn't quite know that before. Unlike any of the other old people in my life -- people who were old when I first came to know them, and not much older when I was a teenager -- he was getting older faster than I was. This left me sad and -- as though I were accelerating my own aging into heart-hardened experience to match the speed of his own senescence -- cruelly indifferent.

posted by William 9:08 AM
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1 comments


Sunday, May 10, 2009
I remember the claim that inserting 'only' between each pair of words in "I hit him in the eye" would produce a different meaning. I spent a good amount of idle time trying to convince myself that "I hit him only in the eye", "I hit him in only the eye", and "I hit him in the eye only" were more than subtly different.

posted by sravana 7:13 PM
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Thursday, May 07, 2009
I remember going out to Doug B's house, maybe upstate? And there were several motor-cycles there, including his brother's chopper, which he'd ridden to New Orleans and back -- a fact whose physical magnitude didn't impress me as much then as it should have. But it was still an epic journey, cross country and unbelievably cool, all of course in imitation of Easy Rider (which I hadn't seen). One reason I didn't realize the physical demands of such a ride was that I'd ridden Vespas in Italy. So I thought I knew how to ride a motorcycle, was feeling cocky, till I got on one. It was amazingly powerful when you gave it some throttle. And I didn't know you had to change gears. Doug showed me all about the clutch and the gearshift. But I kept stalling trying to get out of first. Accelerate really fast and stall. It's probably a good thing that I never managed to get into second.

posted by william 6:13 PM
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