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, November 29, 2011

I remember Luke around age five. We were upstairs in the bedroom he shared with Liana, his older sister, and he was putting on his pajamas. Since we were age-mates, across-the-street neighbors, and hippie children; since we each had a sibling of the opposite sex; and, most importantly, since we considered ourselves married, it was ok for him to be naked. Liana had put me in the room, but I did not feel ashamed—I felt proprietary. Luke wasn't looking for me to be there, and his back was to me as he changed clothes. Reflected in his armoire mirror I could see his tan chest, which I knew well—he often ran around shirtless in our street.

posted by Rosasharn 9:19 PM
. . . 0 comments

Thursday, November 17, 2011

I remember feeling bored. It's such true wisdom that one never feels bored anymore.

posted by sravana 12:07 AM
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Tuesday, November 08, 2011

I remember that I was in the New Yorker bookstore the morning before the first Frazier-Ali fight. I was so glad that Ali was able to fight again, after his principled refusal to go to Vietnam and the grief he took for it. I loved Ali. And I was sure that Frazier, a humorless tank, would beat him. In the bookstore that morning, where people were getting their copy of the Daily News, with a banner headline about the fight that night, I heard two crusty old people talking: one said, "Who do you think will win?" and the other, holding a paper cup of coffee, said, "I want Frazier but I'm afraid Ali will beat him." I couldn't believe that anyone real, anyone I was in the personal presence of, could be rooting for Frazier. I recognized the white right silent majority in this guy, and lost some Confucian respect for my elders. But I was also happy that my own pessimism about Ali's winning wasn't shared: this guy was pessimistic about Frazier. Still, I wasn't surprised when Frazier won, but it did seem unfair to me that Ali missed all that time as world champion.

Later, when he beat Frazier twice it didn't quite make up for the ignominious loss, though I was happy. And later still, I remember a photo of Frazier with a lot of bling leading a funk band he'd put together after retirement. I liked that about him, but still loved Ali more.

posted by William 9:28 AM
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Saturday, November 05, 2011

I remember going to the racetrack early in the mornings with my father, to watch the training. My father had no particular connection with horses or gambling. I wasn't that interested in horses myself (not yet).

It impressed me that my father knew this was a thing one could do, and that he knew we could eat breakfast in the commissary with the trainers and jockeys. (Though maybe jockeys rode only during races; I wouldn't have been able to pick them out by their size, since they were all grown-ups.) The breakfast was much more interesting to me than the racetrack. People knew each other, and they knew that they did not know us, and my father had known that they wouldn't mind.

We may have done this only once. It seemed like something we had always done and always would do.

posted by Carceraglio 8:35 PM
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