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, March 12, 2002

I remember my mother teaching me to play chess. It was in a rented summer house in Stormville, New York. I think my father was at work in the city, and we were alone -- my mother, my sister, me. And I took her queen with my knight in my very first game. I couldn't tell if she really didn't see the knight move, or pretended she didn't see. She never needs to show that she's doing you a kindness -- which makes it all the kinder.

I remember that my grandfather (her father) played according to an Eastern European custom whereby both white and black made two opening moves -- I guess to get into the game more quickly. My grandfather and I were evenly matched. We would play when my grandparents came to dinner.

I remember my dog Powell. We found him in the park, and I naturally wanted to name him Snoopy. But the kid who found him was named Powell, and after my mother's intervention with my father, who desperately didn't want a dog, he agreed to allow us to keep him after we told the story of the kid Powell's finding him if we named the dog Powell. I was very embarrassed by the name at the time, thinking that people would think he was somehow named after Adam Clayton Powell as a sign of disrespect. But I came to love the name, and Powell himself.

I remember that my other grandfather (uptown) would take off his glasses to smoke a cigar in his wing chair every evening. (Eventually he had to quit, in his eighties I think. He died at 99.) He looked very different without his glasses -- younger, a stranger. He also had a Rheingold every afternoon. It tasted awful. I liked the cigar rings, and the Dutch Masters box (though I seem to remember being frightened by Rembrandt's Anatomy Lesson: somehow I got to see a reproduction of the painting in some connection with the box, which I think only showed the figures of the spectators, not the lesson itself. If it showed them at all.

I remember being horrendously frightened by Mr. Potatohead. This had something to do with a Purim party at the Association of Yugoslav Jews. Maybe the same one in which I wore the itchy beard. But I think it was more archaic than that.

posted by william 2:56 PM
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