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, September 19, 2006

I remember walking the narrow ways of the Old City up to Shaar Yafo to catch my bus to school. Often I walked with my brother to get the bus, so maybe I'm remembering walking home from the bus stop? Sometimes I must have walked alone, though, for I remember going from the top of the Jewish Quarter, where we lived, through the streets that divided the Muslim Quarter on one side and the Armenian Quarter on the other out to the ring road that led to Jaffa Gate. I remember the stains on the walls, the occasional whiff of urine (which didn't bother me, felt recognizable and familiar), the garbage, newspapers, that sometimes collected in the corners (which did bother me--I would erase them in my mind, but not touch them lest they were a hefetz hashud--a suspicious object). The streets were walled--that is, the Jerusalem stone buildings, the 2 or 3 storey homes that lined the pedestrian and donkey-cart walkways [not paths, not roads, more like stone-paved alleys?--but we'll call them streets] came straight down to the street, lined the street, walled off the street--so the sound of footsteps bounced around, echoing forward. I remember hearing the sound of approaching feet, and guessing the height and gender of the man or woman walking, and carefully timing my steps to match his or hers, changing the rhythm of my gait to fall in with whoever was coming or going.

I remember coming home from school to our apartment and knowing that my brother was in the house somewhere, and knowing that he was hiding, and searching for him. I remember calling to him, "Yossi, come out, please don't boo me. Please come out. Don't boo me." But he would never come out, and I could not find him, and eventually I would give up looking. "BOOO!" he would shout, as he jumped out of his hiding place. No matter what I did to steel myself, I would always jump, startled, terrified.

I remember feeling the perfection of our courtyard. Perfectly symmetrical--two ground floor apartments, and two upstairs apartments, all with outdoor entrances, a big square court in the center, and terraces outiside the upper entraces. I remember the lemon tree growing in the pot on the terrace outside our door, its pungent flowers and impressive green lemons. I remember the beautiful purple-blue, magenta-veined morning glory flowers that blossomed up along the steps and over to the entry of the apartment. I remember hanging clean laundry on the umbrella-style clothes-lines that stood on the wide part of the terrace outside the window to my parents' bedroom. I could smell it from the small window seat inside. The smell was the smell of fresh field, the scent that brought Jacob's blessing out of Isaac.

And I remember the day that someone left an empty milk carton on the steps to our courtyard, and I was afraid to go in, afraid to go near, could not make myself even step up to the gate and buzz up to my brother. I don't remember if I had a neighbor call the police or simply waited outside for my parents to come home. Was it a hefetz hashud? Had anyone checked it out? Two bombs went off or were destroyed in controlled explosions down the street from my school that year--we could hear them from the playground, from inside our classroom. Whether the police detonated them or whether they went off by themselves, the noise was so violent we had no question as to its origin. The milk carton, though, was just litter.

posted by Rosasharn 9:54 AM
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