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, December 02, 2004

I remember writing thank you notes for my bar mitzvah presents. This was at my desk in the Monaghan's house, the house we were renting in Quiogue, near Westhampon Beach (when we passed the sign coming from New York my sister and I would always cry, "I'm in...[our rear seat passing sign] Quiogue!").

This was the same desk where I wrote my frustrating report on Oklahoma, a state I'd picked only because of the musical which contained "Oh what a beautiful morning," the song my uptown grandmother said my fallen uncle liked so much, (although I liked getting all the mail from the Oklahoma chamber of commerce, and learned a lot about Tulsa); and where I would occasionally write the postcards to Wengen that my grandmother had left for me to send when she and my grandfather were away for the summer.

The thank you notes were a shock, the downside to the reward for all that practicing for the bar mitzvah. I thought the reward was the end of things. But then my mother came with all these cards and envelopes, and I found myself writing to all her friends.

And what I was thanking them for was mainly Savings Bonds, the ersatz money that kept tantalizing me in the envelopes they came in. I'd see something that looked like money, green and elaborately arabesqued, but never was. I remember my downtown grandparents had a lot of savings bonds stuck in their desk drawers too, and it just seemed so pointlessly adult to have this money which wasn't money but only future money, money that belonged to some unimaginable future that only adults would care about (the bonds came with a chart of dates showing their absurdly discounted rates every few years till maturity; and there was an ad campaign on TV which sold them as gifts which were far cheaper than their face value, a value which made kids' faces light up), money that is now for me long spent.

posted by william 7:15 AM
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