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

Tuesday, September 29, 2009

I remember later on being shocked when a bulb I was trying to change broke. I tried to unscrew the base from the inside and of course shocked myself when I did that. I think this was the second time I was shocked. Ken H used to like to stick screw drivers into electric outlets, just for the brief thrill. Did the current go through because we were grounded? Anyhow, I did that once by accident, when I was following Hugh's example and unscrewing the plate so I could attach a grounding wire to the screw that held it in. The bulb was worse, but they were both so weird. I suddenly knew what a live current meant (on dry cells the picture wire we improvised with just got very hot), but it wasn't what I would want to think of as life. The electric chair seemed very strange after that: the living perception of a live current meaning death.

posted by William 12:18 PM
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I remember that my father was master of lightbulbs and extension cords and door knobs. There were three bulbs in the fixture in my room, and I barely noticed it if one went out; and when two went out I got used to the dim dinginess pretty quickly. But my father would come with the step-ladder and change the bulbs, and then the room would flood with light. Extension cords were earlier: when he showed home movies he'd have to set up the screen at the end of the living room, and get out the projector to put on a little end table, and run an extension cord from the projector to the wall behind the lamps. I was always told to be careful around that extension cord. We didn't put it under a throw rug because they thought (especially my mother) that that would be a fire hazard. And I remember that my father would sometimes come holding an incongruously small screw driver in his large hands to tighten the screws that held the door knobs in place.

posted by William 12:12 PM
. . . 1 comments

Saturday, September 26, 2009

I remember going to see Alicia de Larrocha play in Philharmonic Hall (I think) with my father. We were amazed by how small she was but how tremendous her reach was. When she played fortissimo, you could see her whole body reverberating with the force she applied to the keys. She looked sweet and benevolent when not playing, and ferocious when she played.

posted by William 11:39 PM
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Friday, September 18, 2009

I remember passing a guy walking down 89th street with a monkey on a long leash. The monkey scampered up a No Parking sign, and also onto the guy's shoulder. It was surprising and interesting, but not after all that surprising and interesting. My parents noticed it the same way: one of those little events sure to add some diversion to your walk.

posted by William 1:43 PM
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Friday, September 11, 2009

I remember sitting in a no-parking zone and hearing about the attacks on the phone from Lisa P. who said that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. I thought: no big deal because I remembered that a plane had hit the Empire State Building in the forties, with I think only two casualties. But I turned on the radio just in time to hear the radio correspondent from Washington yell that a plane had just slammed into the Pentagon, and suddenly I was really appalled and worried. That night I watched the Golf Channel for hours.

posted by William 3:30 PM
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Tuesday, September 01, 2009

I remember that during the Second World War my parents and I escaped from Sarajevo which was under Nazi and Quisling rule, to the zone of Yugoslavia occupied by the Italians. They were more lenient toward the Jews. We landed in Split but after a few months the Italian authorities decided that we must be dispersed to and confined on neighboring islands. We ended up on the island of Korcula, in the village of Vela Luka, renamed Valle Grande by the Italians who had annexed that part of Yugoslavia. Vela Luka was a small primitive fishing village of about five thousand inhabitants. We rented an “apartment” from some local peasants. ( I was then about nine years old.) There was a large street level room which served as kitchen, dining room, and living room. The floor was of some material which sloughed off every time you swept it so that there was never a time when you felt that you had finished the sweeping job. There was no plumbing though there was a sink with a hole in it through which dirty water was collected in a pail below. The pail was then emptied into a pit where a pig owned by the peasant family was confined. A set of stairs without a banister led upstairs to the bedroom which was closed off by a trap door. (You had to be sure that the trap door was closed at night so that you wouldn’t fall through.) My parents and I shared the bedroom; they in a large bed and I in some sort of palette with a mattress. The mattresses were filled with straw and the ticking had a hole in the middle into which one inserted one’s hand to redistrubute the straw when it got lumpy. A door from the bedroom led to a sort of balcony off which was a toilet consisting of a wooden bench with a hole and a cover. Below was the cesspool. It got brutally cold using the bathroom in the winter.

Above the bedroom was a set of stairs leading to a storage room which was infested by rats. The rats never visited downstairs but ran very loudly at night and we dubbed the whole sound “horse races.” We stored potatoes and big demijohns of olive oil up there.

One time my mother was trying to do some frying in the kitchen and had opened a new oil demijohn. She noticed suspicious hairs in the pan and found on examination that a number of mice had gotten into the container and drowned. Obviously we threw away the whole thing but when she later talked to a doctor friend of ours, he said that if she had not noticed that, the food would have been lethal. (A very young man with a young wife. A very negligent kind of doctor. Later we heard that he had been shot by the partisans, I forget why.)

posted by alma 9:57 AM
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