I remember / je me souviens
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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, May 29, 2012
I remember being surprised that my Latin book had such a good translation of Martial, and also that Martial was so modern:
I do not love thee, Doctor Fell. The reason why, I cannot tell. But this I know, and know full well: I do not love thee, Doctor Fell.
I wondered a bit about what kind of doctor he was, and why his name didn't sound Latin.

posted by William 6:18 PM
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Friday, May 25, 2012
I remember the challenge my mother set for making challah dough: You start the yeast first, with a little warm water and sugar in a tall glass. Then race to assemble the rest of the ingredients in the big bowl (12 cups flour; three quarters cup (or a cup) sugar and some amount of salt (2 t?) dissolved in two and some cups boiling water; six eggs; 10 T oil), wet ingredients mixed in a well in the center of the dry flour, before the yeast overflowed its container. You always add the yeast last.

posted by Rosasharn 9:51 AM
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Thursday, May 24, 2012
I remember the regular shock of things not turning out right. I remember, for instance, accepting the not-red construction-paper butterfly wings for the Siddur Party in first grade: It wasn't a big deal, because, I figured, I would simply color them red with crayons. Color as I might, they never became red, and I was so sorry, so disappointed--wings marred by irregular scribbles, nothing like the red and lovely adornments I wanted. I remember drawing figures--heads, bodies, hair, arms, hands, legs, feet, belly-buttons--all the parts that I knew a person ought to have, in the shapes I knew those parts to be--or flowers, with green leaves and petals in lovely colors--or houses with rectangular windows and steps and a chimney--none of which came out the way they ought to: they looked like a child's drawing, nothing like the beautiful things that I saw in my mind.

posted by Rosasharn 4:48 PM
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Saturday, May 19, 2012
I remember the nursery rhyme, sort of, which my father recited, I recall, in the lobby of my uptown grandmother's building:
...[something] scholar What made you come so soon? You used to come at 10 o'clock, Now you come at noon.
The consistency of the irony seemed wrong: I would have thought the sarcasm would be if he'd arrived slightly earlier than usual but still much later than he ought to have. If he ordinarily arrived at 10, say, but today arrived at 9:30. The idea of arriving at 10 was shocking to me, since we had to be at school by 8:15 at the latest. And I couldn't quite understand why he was being called a scholar, which I already took to be a term of praise, maybe from Hebrew School? Anyhow I can see now that the jingle violated my sense and expectation of the irony of faint praise, which was the kind of irony my mother, the real ironist in the family, tended (and still tends) to employ. Somehow my father's recitation of the poem (he was the one who did recite poems) made me link him to ways of speaking more characteristic of my mother. Naturally, what I didn't see is that the poem itself was forced into the somewhat feeble shift of a sarcasm that didn't quite work, because it had to both lay out the situation (you're a habitual latecomer: "You used to come at 10 o'clock" plus today it's worse than ever since "Now you come at noon") and ironize it ("What made you come so soon?"). But I didn't spend my time on that kind of scholarship then.

posted by William 12:24 PM
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Saturday, May 05, 2012
I remember the butterfly locks inside our bathroom doors. I was forbidden to touch them before I ever knew what they were. At some point, years later, I learned they were locks and that adults could work them, and years after that I wss allowed to use them too. They went from being yet another example of some pure adult object, not a symbol nor an instrument but just something serenely legible only to adults (when the locks were just inscrutable features of the adult world), to a kind of knowledgeable agent interacting with them, even adult visitors (when I learned they were locks), to a sign of my own arrival at an age of competence (when I too was allowed to turn them).

posted by William 5:34 PM
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Wednesday, May 02, 2012
I remember Tirzah. I remember an afternoon at Colette's house. It was nice weather, and we sat outside her front door--Colette in her chair with her back to her entry, the rest of us arranged on the pillowed concrete benches built in to either side of the entryway. I remember Tirzah coming a little before dusk, and telling a troubled dream (which I don't recall). Colette asked Tirzah and then each of us how we felt at the end of the dream (or its retelling). Then someone showed a painting of a severe-looking, dark, long-faced man. I don't remember what I said about the painting, but I do remember what Colette said: You are attracted to what you fear. After Colette died, Tirzah held a salon in her house for the students to share their memories together. Though I was too young to have been a student when I was in Israel, Tirzah welcomed me warmly. Her home was beautiful, and we gathered in her enclosed mirpeset (balcony). I sat on the floor, which was so thick with rich carpets that it felt like sitting on a bed.

posted by Rosasharn 1:31 PM
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