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, May 29, 2003

I remember my uptown grandmother used to wear a large golden brooch on the left lapel of her coat (is it a brooch if it's as oblong as a pilots' wings?); the unwieldy pin made the coat seem unwieldy too. I think this was the style among European women of a certain age, like her pea drop veils. But I don't remember my other grandmother ever doing this -- I think it felt to me like a middle-European or Ashkenazi practice, so that my Sephardic downtown grandmother wouldn't be wearing one. I was put in mind of this a few weeks ago in New York when I saw an elderly and supercilious French woman with her eleven year old American grandson (they were speaking French to each other, English to the waiter) also wearing such a pin. The juxtaposition was striking: the pin still looked Vienese and heavy, with an awkward dumb friendliness about it, but its wearer was very different from all that -- not like either of my grandmothers, nor of any grandmother I knew (although not unlike the mothers of some friends of mine: but they wouldn't have been caught dead with such a pin on their coats).

posted by william 7:34 AM
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