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, May 08, 2002

I remember a record I had of Hans Christian Anderson stories. I'm certain that it was Danny Kaye reading them (who else would it have been?) -- I still remember the voice, and it was the voice of Danny Kaye. I remember one story on the record, about a cook who couldn't resist eating the two geese that he had prepared for his master; one was supposed to be served to a guest. What would he do? When the guest arrived he whispered to him that his master wanted to cut off one of his ears. (I wonder whether Van Gogh knew this story? It made Van Gogh's self-mutilation less surprising to me when I learned about it in school -- a normal thing for a crazy person to do.) The guest is skeptical, but then the master comes out sharpening his knife, and making remarks about how his mouth is already watering. The guest decides he might leave; the master returns with the sharp knife to find neither guest nor goose. The cook explains that the guest has grabbed both geese and taken off. The master runs after him crying "Not both, just one! Not both, just one!" The guest thinks he means ears, and runs away all the more terrified. So the cook deftly avoids trouble. Even then I sensed that there was something excessive about the story, or something odd about it that made it about more than ears.

I remember my grandmother reading me the story about the wolf tricked into ice-fishing with his tail, which then gets cut off. I was terrified by that story, and later found that it was a crystallizing tale in Freud's account of the Wold Man's malady.

I remember my mother telling me that you could get petrified with fear. I think she was explaining what the real experience behind the Medusa myth was. Either after this explanation or prompting it was a horror movie scene that I remember, where some good-looking cad has just been cruel to a young woman who turns out to be or to have been made into a monster. She starts transforming in the room by whose door he is just leaving, and he stands there unable to move. By the time he takes off, it's too late. That's all I remember about that movie.

I remember in my book of Myths and Legendsthe story of the Graiae and their single eye. There was a picture of one of them handing the eye to another: it looked up from her palm. I asked me my mother whether the eye could see -- just the eye, lying there. She said yes, which seemed right to me, although that raised the interesting question of just what this seeing was that wasn't any person seeing. It struck me (and still strikes me now) as similar to my worries and thoughts about whether my consciousness could really be extinguished: whether there wouldn't be "John" or someone (see an earlier entry) who wouldn't be me at all, but whose consciousness I would then have.

I remember Max und Moritz and Struwelpater and how scary I thought he was. My uptown grandmother owned these books, in German. I remember that Max und Moritz, after not learning their lesson, had their bones ground into flour. I didn't quite know what that would mean. But it was wild Struwelpater (I thought it was Strudelpater) who really terrified me.

I remember how much I hated strudel.

I remember a Golden Book Giant that I had that told a shockingly grim story about some kids who played with matches. I think it was the first story I ever heard about decent children (unlike Struwelpater and Max und Moritz) that didn't end happily. (They burned to death.)

I remember the same book answered the question how high the sky was by saying that we could all touch the sky. It showed a girl standing on top of a low hill with her hands up, and it said she was touching the sky. I thought this might be cheating -- it's not what I meant by the sky. But the book was asserting that what I meant was just wrong. This might not have been the same book: it might have been a fourth or fifth grade science book.

I remember first hearing the word skyscraperfrom my uptown grandmother, and thinking what a wonderful word it was.

posted by william 6:21 AM
. . . 1 comments
Comments:
Thanks for this - we were hunting for the tale, and your blog gave us the information we needed to find the stories.

We did find a recording (though not Danny Kaye) here: http://ia300214.us.archive.org/2/items/grimms_english_librivox/grimm_26_clevergretel.mp3

My wife says that Danny did it better.

# posted by Kevin : 1:17 AM

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