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, November 02, 2002

I remember that when he was a little boy my Uncle Willy was playing with some nails at school. His teacher asked him what he had, and he popped them in his mouth. His teacher asked him to open his mouth, and he swallowed them. My uptown grandmother took him to the doctor, who made him eat mashed potatoes for three days. I imagined her as being my doctor, Dr. Steffy. I somehow always thought this happened in New York, but he was fifteen when they arrived in New York in 1940 (two days shy of nineteen when he died two days shy of D-Day), so this would have happened in Sisak, Yugoslavia. I think it is the only story she ever told about him where he was naughty. My father always complained, and still complains, that after his death all the family stories were applied to him -- his mother's incessant mourning (or melancholia I suppose in Freud's terminology: aggressive sadness, but not depression) poisoned his life. I remember his cigarette case, returned by the Army, among the curios my grandmother displayed (including letters from him), and that seemed always a slight disparity: if he was such a good boy, why had he smoked?

posted by william 7:32 AM
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