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

Wednesday, February 27, 2013

I remember an illustration in a textbook, maybe in elementary school, that showed how strong an ant was supposed to be relative to its size by picturing a human-sized ant carrying a locomotive on its back. The picture was supposed to be surprising, and it added to that surprise to see an ant carrying a locomotive around instead of riding on it.

posted by William 11:15 PM
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Monday, February 25, 2013

I remember snippets of the BQC opening theme song: "the questions come, they chase each other ... where everything I want to know is there ... books books books ... the test of will, the test of mind, the test we're gonna win, the Bournvita quiz contest!"

posted by sravana 12:12 AM
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Saturday, February 23, 2013

I remember the only time that my father hit me. I was being dressed by our old time maid while he was watching (my mother was absent learning a craft in Paris; I might have been five or six). While being dressed I was deliberately uncooperative and obstructive, squirming and making it difficult for her. My father, a man of liberal views and a highly developed sense of justice, particularly where people in a subservient position were involved, could not stand the sight of the maid struggling. Enraged, he hit my arm, which as it happened swelled up to some extent. After the initial shock, I didn't consider the incident a big deal, but he was haunted by it, by his own rage and force, and he never hit me again. He also never forgot it.

posted by alma 10:16 AM
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I remember indirectly that when I was two years old and alone at home with our maid, who like all our maids was a peasant woman recently arrived in the city (Sarajevo). I reached up to the stove, and spilled a pot of hot coffee all over my arm. The maid applied the peasant remedy: putting my arm under cold water. When my parents arrived, they had a fit, because the medical lore at the time (1934) required that the arm be treated with salves. As was recognized later, the maid's remedy was the right one, and my arm bears no scar whatever of the incident.

posted by alma 10:10 AM
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Thursday, February 07, 2013

I remember that when I had to clear the table -- a twice-nightly chore I despised, since my father just sat there, waiting for the magical transformation of surface, first for the fruit, which he wouldn't eat if there were any relics of the main meal still there, then for the end of the evening -- I would always feel still more oppressed when my mother made me get a tray from the kitchen to stack the plates and bowls on. I knew it was more efficient to take everything out on a tray, but I was too lazy to want to be efficient. Getting the tray added a different kind of step to the whole process. Instead of just mindlessly bringing in plate and glass and crumpled napkin as they came into my reach, I had to think about the thing, put it all together, come up with an algorithm that compressed the dirty dishes efficiently on the tray. And the best way for me to both cherish and distract myself from my resentment at this chore (abraüm!, my father kept demanding) was to go off into my own world as I brought things haphazardly into the kitchen, that haphazardness a kind of protest, I think I now see, to the tyrannical orderliness my father insisted on.

posted by William 5:49 PM
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Wednesday, February 06, 2013

I remember reading a science fiction novel -- maybe Asimov, Fantastic Voyage even, though possibly Robert Silverberg, or Ray Bradbury? -- where some very skillful professional, perhaps a surgeon, is being described to a young, ambitious up-and-comer as having "forgotten more than you'll ever know." And I wondered why that would be a good thing, since the young person was learning the essentials. Had the wise professional forgotten them? That didn't sound good. And yet I knew this was praise of his skill.

posted by William 8:25 AM
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