I remember / je me souviens

I remember / je me souviens

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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, September 11, 2003

From Jenn Lewin:

I remember my uncle and my cousins visiting us in NYC during the summer of 1995, when we lived on Amsterdam and 122nd. They stayed over and the next day they wanted to see the Twin Towers, which featured in a movie they liked (I want to say it was Dumb and Dumber but that may not be true). We didn't want to go all the way downtown even though it was on the same subway line so we said goodbye; they were to go home to Lawrenceville via Penn Station afterwards. A few weeks later they sent us pictures they'd taken on their trip and some of them were of their visit to the WTC. The buildings were still ugly but that wasn't what mattered. What mattered to me then was my regret (I was surprised to feel regret) at not going with them because it looked as if they'd had a lot of fun and we weren't there. So when a friend from Paris, Jean-Marc, came to stay a week or so later one of the first things we did was to go up there. I remember the elevator going really fast and feeling fearless. I was proud, in a way I didn't expect myself to be, being there.

I remember flying home for the summer from Nashville to Providence in May of 2001, on the night of Mother's Day. I had taken that flight many times that year because my mother-in-law was ill and Dien was living with her in Newton and it was a direct, cheap flight. But this time we had to change routes, I can't remember why, and when we came upon the Twin Towers it seemed as if we were really, simply coming across them, on some kind of air-boat just floating by in slow motion, a perfectly natural and strange thing to be doing, and they were all lit up. I'd never had that view of them before. As we approached I'd been writing in my diary, and I stopped to look out the window, and I watched th! em as I wrote for probably 5 minutes. As I did so I cried, from stress, gratitude, and sorrow. I was going home to what would be a changed world because I knew it would be our last summer with my mother-in-law, and it would be her last summer. But I remember feeling that the towers at that moment had a special meaning, that they knew something. They had a deep, golden glow.

When 9/11 happened we got a call that morning from two old friends of Dien's mom in Hong Kong who wanted to make sure that she was okay because they knew how much she traveled to Chinatown. She had died 6 weeks before, and they hadn't been told, and there was the horrible strangeness of having to tell them at that moment.

Jenn Lewin

posted by william 11:50 PM
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