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, July 20, 2019

I remember that in the spring of 1969 we talked in school about the risk that the lunar surface would turn out to be made of a sand or dust that wouldn't support the weight of the lander. I remember that I thought it was funny that it was called LEM, because I had a friend named Lem who was a lot like Linus in Charlie Brown and I assumed everyone made the same connection. I remember that we were away in Europe when the landing occurred, with no TV, but that we saw a bit of it on a TV in an airport passageway -- but we were being rushed along. I remember, like everyone else, not getting why Armstrong said "for man" since "man" there sounded like a synonym for "mankind." I deeply regretted that he didn't say "a man." I remember people worrying about how sterile moon rocks would be, or whether they would introduce some horrendous diseases we weren't immune to. I remember that the moon landing didn't seem like such a big deal to those of us who grew up on science fiction -- Star Trek, and earlier Flash Gordon, and of course some of those old movies, including the one with the stowaway woman whose weight destroyed the flight dynamics and insured that she and the astronaut would die, romantically. I remember that I was much more passionately interested in the Mets, who came back form nine-and-a-half games back in early August (I remember my father just shrugging and saying that it was over to them) to destroy the Cubs and clinch in September -- this was the season when Jimmy Qualls broke up Tom Seaver's perfect game (in June) with one out in the ninth. I remember (as I've said before) that Tommy Agee and Cleon Jones looked at each other shaking their heads as the line drive hit right between them. I remember that the most interesting things about the moon missions were the delay over 237,000 miles, so that you heard the echo of what was said about two seconds after it was said; and the slingshot flight of Apollo 10, where they went around the moon, seeing its dark side for the first time. I thought this was very cool, but also a frustrating missed chance for those astronauts. I remember feeling sorry for Michael Collins for the same reason.

posted by William 4:54 PM
. . . 0 comments

Wednesday, July 10, 2019

I remember reading Jim Bouton's Ball Four when it came out in paperback. I knew very little about professional baseball then, but the book was fascinating. I was prepared to hate it, just as I hated Curt Flood, because I wanted to think only the best of baseball as an institution. But then I liked it.

posted by William 10:51 PM
. . . 0 comments

Monday, July 01, 2019

I remember that my father would refer to my grandmother in conversation as "my mother" (i.e. his mother). With me he used to call her by her nickname (Omama), but that slowly faded, and of course with my own mother he always called her "my mother." There was something strange about this: it was fine for him to call my grandfather "my father," and fine for my mother to call her parents "my mother" and "my father." But it didn't quite seem right for my father to have a mother the way I did, someone he called "my mother." I think the reason that the other three terms didn't bother me was that he was my father, so calling his father "my father" couldn't really overcome that eclipse. And of course my mother's father had nothing to do with the paternal side of my family. As to my mother's mother, I think my mother was so clearly my mother, and her mother was so clearly not, that it just didn't come up. Or maybe it was that my father had these relations to two mothers -- one my real mother, and the other an old, antiquated crone, waiting to tell me stories of the past, or maybe waiting for the past to come back, for the old antiquated days to come crushingly to life.

posted by William 7:13 PM
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