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

Thursday, September 12, 2002

I remember my father's bathing suits, and the little change pocket that hung inside, just under the drawstringed waist. I remember how long his suit would stay wet. I remember him teaching me to dive. My mother could dive, but he couldn't (another division between them, as was her tennis playing); he couldn't go under water without holding his nose, and more to the point he couldn't get himself to go in head-first. So he taught me to dive while I was young before I developed a reflex against it. We would go out to the little wooden raft thirty feet or so out in Lake Como and I would stand at its edge and bend double at the waist and go in head first. This seemed to me graceless and pointless and much less fun than jumping off the huge diving board halfway out to the raft, or jumping off the two platforms on the raft, one three feet high, the other five. After a while I got okay at diving, and even dove off some high diving boards later on, till trying to impress a girl who'd done a wonderful swan dive I chickened out half way and did a belly flop. It stung a lot.

I remember that my mother's mother was a champion tennis player in her youth (which it turned out made her better than you'd think: she hadn't played for decades when I started playing seriously, but even in her sixties as she was then she could beat my thirteen year old self with much harder and faster ground-strokes); I found this hard to picture. What I understood even less was that she was said to have been famous as "a great beauty" in her youth, which I vaguely took to mean she'd had some official imprimatur as a great beauty. That was very hard to figure -- even looking at old photos or extrapolating backwards. I think I thought that old people must have always had strange and elderly tastes. But my mother said my grandmother was a great beauty, and my mother was beautiful -- this was the hard thing to understand.

I remember that my grandmother went and worked as a dress-maker in Paris for a year when my mother was a little girl, leaving her and her father in Sarajevo. They had a cousin there in whose shop my grandmother worked. Later my grandfather became a dressmaker in New York, and was a member of the ILGWU, which entitled them to own an apartment in Chelsea, in the union buildings. But they couldn't legate it to anyone, by the rules of the cooperative. There was a cooperative grocery store there too that had co-op milk and I recall muenster cheese. I remember my grandfather got some magazine as a union member and when I was searching for salacious material I found a promising copy that turned out, alas, to be about bras designed to be comfortable when worn with breast prostheses. When they came to the United States as DPs after the war, my grandmother sewed gloves for a while. I remember that she hated to be called "honey" or "dear" by clerks at department stores. I think I may remember these things together because someone at a glove counter might have called her "dear."

posted by william 12:10 AM
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