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

Monday, October 02, 2006

I remember one Yom Kippur when my mother and her mother-in-law (my uptown grandmother) weren't speaking. My mother consented, for the sake of family harmony, to come with us to break fast, but declared in advance that she wouldn't talk to my grandmother. When we were there my father expostulated with her: "Come on, honey, it's Yom Kippur." We were standing by a breakfront in the hallway just between the dining room and the living room, which we were about to enter: my grandmother had gone to the kitchen to do something for a minute. My mother thought about it for a moment and relented, much to my surprise. It was a happy ending!

But it turned out it wasn't a complete ending: my mother was now willing to appear on good terms with my grandmother, but it also became clear to me that it wasn't like when she forgave me, when whatever she'd been angry about was over. And even more to my surprise, since I thought of my grandmother as wonderfully open about all her passions, it turned out my grandmother continued to harbor resentment of my mother, about which she would hint darkly to me. (Things went along ok for a while, until a bigger blow up a few months later, after which my two sets of grandparents wouldn't talk to each other at all, and yet they both spoke Yugoslav; and my grandmother and mother broke for many years.)

posted by william 12:10 PM
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