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, March 27, 2003

I remember my Lederhosen. My short leather overalls, with various designs tooled into it, especially the chest flap, and with leather thongs binding its pieces together. I rather think my parents bought them for me in Austria on one of their European trips. I had mixed feelings about them -- they were enticingly European, back when Europe was the most potent of names for me, but they were somewhat uncomfortable. (I remember thinking this, but I don't have any visceral sense of their discomfort, as I do of the socks that used to ensnare my ingrown toenails when I was three or four: I was told about the toenails later, but I remember that terrible frustrating pain of getting the nail snagged in the sock.) Although she didn't give them to me, they thrilled my uptown grandmother, because my Uncle Willy, her beloved first-born killed in 1944, had a pair when he was a child. She told me how he once fell into a pool (I now imagine: a pond, but I thought then a swimming pool) wearing them and she said they turned hard as concrete. I found this fascinating, and thought about the possible metamorphosis of my Lederhosen into their own stone monument. I think I expected this to one day happen, in that future in which all more adult things come to pass. But in the meantime I was obsessively careful about not spilling a single drop on to them, while at the same time being secretely disappointed that when they did get splashed the droplets didn't petrify the spots they hit. Then I drifted away from thinking about them, but I was reminded of them with pleasure when I was taken to see The Sound of Music. But after that they got put away in a closet, and then in a chest, and now for all I know they've turned to rock in some humid land-fill, but I never saw them again.

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