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, November 26, 2002

I remember that when my parents went to Europe when I was seven (or possibly six), they agreed to send me a telegram saying that they'd arrived safely (in London). I think I had just learned about telegrams. I was staying with my uptown grandmother, and the next morning we got the telegram. I had never seen one before and was puzzled by the words taped to the paper, and by the STOPs. I remember that it said "ARRIVED SAFELY STOP MUMMY AND DADDY". I was very disturbed by the word MUMMY since I spelled it "Mommy." I entertained the paranoid idea that it was a mistake or forgery, but I think my grandmother figured out that it was the English spelling. At any rate, at some point I understood that the woman who transmitted the telegram (I think that they were all women at the time, but it could be that when my parents explained what happened they mentioned that they had dictated the telegram to a woman) had spelled the word in the English fashion. It somehow made England seem real to me, in a way that it never had before, and also it made me resent this woman, who did seem to be trying to come between my mother and me, the deviant British spelling proclaiming at once that from now on I would have a Mummy and not a Mommy and that any access to Mommy came through this Mummy who spelled the word that way and had the authority to do so, authority before which my own poor mother was helpless. I was glad when they came back home.

posted by william 12:58 AM
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