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, July 02, 2002

I remember when the word people used for "irritable" was nervous. My mother would snap at me, and then explain that she was "nervous." This was much to be preferred to her being angry at me, and I would just avoid bothering her, without feeling bad. One day I snapped at my grandmother (her mother), and then explained that I was nervous. This was one of the few times she ever got genuinely angry at me: she dressed me down saying that there was no reason for me to be nervous, since I hadn't experience what my parents and their parents had: escape, displacement, refugee-hood, incarceration in prison camp, the War. All of which made me feel a sort of awe about my parents' irritability or nervousness, as though I was in touch with something on a historical scale, and could experience a connection to it just by being a little bit irritating.

I remember that -- maybe the same day -- my downtown grandmother wouldn't allow me to dress all in black, and in particular refused to allow me to buy a black turtleneck shirt. Those were for the blackshirts -- the fascists.

I remember that my uptown grandfather refused ever to get into either a German or a Japanese car.

posted by william 12:11 AM
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