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, January 28, 2010

I remember my mother telling me about Animal Crackers. I think we'd read about them in a story, and then she told me they were real! Somewhere in the world the thing this fiction mentioned really existed. More than the Museum in Danny and the Dinosaur since that museum wasn't the real Museum of Natural History. And then: she said I could have some. And that turned out not to mean... some day. It meant the very next day: she brought a box home. Of course they weren't as amazing as the Animal Crackers in the story, which were really beautifully illustrated, and numerous, and seemed three-dimensional, because they were in a picture, and maybe even they came to life (though I don't think so: I think it was only that I assumed they were 3D). But they were still pretty amazing, and I was happy.

posted by William 6:54 PM
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Monday, January 25, 2010

I remember that an odd furry clump showed up one morning with my parents change and keys. They told me it was a rabbit's foot, which seemed gross but unlikely, and that it brought good luck. I was given one myself a couple of years later. They seemed too colorful and clean to actually be rabbits' feet, but like so much else they did signify some special adult skill in understanding and negotiating reality: just the way both my parents knew all about it the night someone gave them one was part of their ease in the adult world.

posted by William 8:28 PM
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Monday, January 18, 2010

I remember that when Boeing introduced the 747 there were TV commercials showing glamorous people with drinks standing around a grand piano while behind them a spiral staircase led to an upper deck where they could look out of the window, like in a nineteen thirties movie nightclub. A year or two later we got to fly in one! It was just a lot of seats with nothing interesting about the plane except its size. (Once I got to sit in the upper deck, which was like sitting in the upper deck of an observation car but with normal porthole windows and nothing else interesting about it.)

posted by William 5:48 PM
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Thursday, January 07, 2010

I remember my cousin Cico, my mother's blood brother, who was a survivor and a lusty smoker and bon vivant, and a great athlete, could outrun me very easily (the only adult in my family who could). I think I only met him on one trip: I remember him diving into the Adriatic and also running the mile I always ran with me. He told me that there were 1582 meters to the mile, a slightly inaccurate stastic that I nevertheless keep using as my instinctive reference. I was about nine or ten when I met him (was I really running then? Maybe I met him again at twelve--no older thatn that. He died at about forty a year or two later of a heart attack. He had That adult European soccer-ball handling skill and exuberance too, I remember.

posted by William 5:47 PM
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