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, May 13, 2003

I remember when I was just learning to swim, my parents and the Herings had to leave Stormville for the day one Saturday. My father made me "solemnly swear" not to go swimming while they were gone. I remember swearing to him in their bedroom, and then reaffirming it as they drove away downhill on the gravel driveway. I was the oldest of five (or maybe then just four) kids there: my sister and the Hering's kids being the others. The housekeeper/nanny, who spoke mainly German, suggested we go swimming in the pool. I told her we weren't allowed to. She said that my mother had said it was all right. I remember our colloquy: "Aber mein Vater!" I said; "Aber deine Mutter!" she replied (I don't know whether I'm spelling any better than I spoke at the time). So finally we went swimming, and I even took off my orange life preserver since I could now do a side kick. When my parents got home my father asked whether I'd gone swimming. I told him I had, but he thought I was joking. It took a while to convince him that I wasn't. Then I was in big trouble. He couldn't believe it. I tried to explain it, but he wasn't interested. I was sent to my room to think! I had no idea what that meant. But I tried. I lay in the musty dark room on the nappy woven bed-spread. Everyone else went out. I talked to my mother later. I think we were walking through the "big field" which the back porch looked out on. She told me that my father was very upset. "But he's not crying," I said. She said he was "crying inside." (Though maybe that was another occasion.) I tried to imagine the tears flowing down the inside of his face.

The next day she prevailed upon me to apologize again. It was his thirtieth birthday, so I must have been not quite five. (I find this hard to believe: maybe I thought it was his thirtieth birthday but it was actually his thirty-third. That would have made me nearly seven: much more likely.) I did apologize, and he forgave me, but with great seriousness and gravity. He never lost his temper: a very rare thing for him when he was angry, or "crying inside." I was never spanked for this, also a rarity.

I remember coming up, then, with a hierarchy of sworn commitments (like all those other hierarchies: nuclear devices, karate belts, and pigeons -- see 5/23/2002 archived here): promising, swearing, "solemnly swearing," and then I think "swearing upon your life, etc." "Cross your heart and hope to die," a phrase I learned from Hugh Cramer and one which seemed bizarre and empty to me, was I think between swearing and solemnly swearing. I don't know when I gave up this notion of solemnity.

posted by william 5:55 AM
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