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

Saturday, October 30, 2010

I remember that Michael C. pronounced "new" without the enya or y after the initial consonant in my pronunciation. And Mr. Stern pronounced "Beautiful" "bee-ootifel" (so the first syllable was different from the first syllable of "beauty"). None of the other Sterns said it like that, so his way sounded to me like a wonderful affectation, a kind of demonstration that the beautiful thing he was praising was so good that it could survive his corny pronunciation, even flourish. As though its beauty had made him a goofy kid again, and made it okay for us kids to see that beauty was part of the array of the pure, transcendent, childish fun he was so good at encouraging and joining.

posted by William 10:48 AM
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Monday, October 18, 2010

I remember one lovely pleasure of running cross-country: the way school opened out to space and solitude. We'd start running and as a mid-level runner I'd be more or less alone after a couple of miles, a few hundred yards behind the leaders, a few hundred yards ahead of the stragglers, running up and down hills and through the woods. So it was as though the more or less broad social splotch of school was suddenly pulled into a very long corridor of space, sunny and crisply cold and free. I knew I'd end up back where we'd started, at school or the buses, but in the meantime there was just a lot of ground I didn't know but that was where I should be, space that I was the only person passing through, landscapes that had nothing to do with school or anything interior or any concerted effort or task or assignment. Yes, we were supposed to run, but what cross-country is about is running through spaces not designed for cross-country, unlike soccer fields or basketball courts. I was on a school team, but not at school, I was doing what I was supposed to be doing, but not at home, I was with my friends but not with them since they were elsewhere, ahead or behind. Where I was, nothing was making any demand of me; nothing was interested in me. I think this may have been the first experience, and maybe the last, where I could just look around.

posted by William 7:10 PM
. . . 1 comments

Thursday, October 14, 2010

I remember power-cuts. (Should I say blackouts? The word doesn't convey the same thing to me. A power-cut is a temporary, normal interruption of electricity; there is something sinister and unexpected about a blackout.) They were usually on weeknights around dinner time and it was usually dark and raining. Depending on how hungry we were, we'd postpone dinner, or eat it by candlelight. Food is strange in that light -- familiar dishes suddenly look foreign and something about their taste is subdued. We weren't allowed to read under candles, so we had to set aside homework and sit together and do nothing and talk. I remember that if I had a test the next day, I would try to quiz myself in my head -- not very effective. At some point, we got a battery-powered lamp, but it wasn't really much better than candles, just a harsher light. I think I was allowed to study under it on occasion, if it was particularly important. I remember the annoyance of mosquitoes and sometimes, heat, and I'd often think how strange it was that comfort relied so heavily and almost solely on fans and electric mosquito mats.

I remember that the power would come back on with a sudden burst of light and the less sudden whirring of the ceiling fans. The sound of them turning on would start with the light, increasing within a few seconds, but only a few more seconds later would the coolness hit. I remember that my brother and I would race each other to blowing out the candles.

posted by sravana 12:33 AM
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Sunday, October 03, 2010

I remember that one evening, my father brought a pack of cigarettes home and lit one. It scared me, not because I knew or cared about what was wrong with smoking, but because it was in my mind a forbidden action. A parent doing something that they had (abstractly) instilled in me was wrong was contradictory and confusing, and I guess also signified their fallibility, and the idea that I'd sometimes have to tell them what to do rather than the other way around. I was also disturbed that my father was amused at my yelling at him to stop -- wasn't it serious enough, then?

posted by sravana 10:39 PM
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