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

Wednesday, June 22, 2005

I remember copying the Our Father from the blackboard, probably the first passage we were made to write. It seemed so long then; it filled nearly two small notebook pages (my letters must have been really large). I remember that it was the first time seeing the words, 'hallowed' and 'trespass'. No one else seemed to understand 'hallowed' either; they said 'helloed', or just 'hello' (hello be thy name!). I wasn't comfortable with 'hello', so I checked with my mother, who said it was 'haloed', and explained what a halo was. I had been watching The Mahabharata on TV, so I associated it with the halos on Krishna, which then resulted in my visualizing the Father who art in Heaven as a Hindu god (which wasn't the first time). I don't think I realized it was actually 'hallowed' till I came across the word much later in, I think, a P.G. Wodehouse story.

I don't know how exactly my mother explained 'trespass', but I understood it as stealing -- forgive us if we steal as we forgive those who steal from us. I thought it was too mundane a line to be included in something that spoke of things like power, glory and forever. (Because... what do first-graders steal? Pencils. Lunch boxes. But that had some connection to 'daily bread' too...)

posted by sravana 3:20 PM
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