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 16, 2006

I remember spending a long summer afternoon with a young woman who asked me a lot of questions. I was about five. She was a member of our havurah community. I remember hearing some of her conversation with my parents, some murky yet light notion of these being tests, her wanting to learn something [from me? was she in graduate school?], and then I remember spending time with her in her apartment and on her second-storey porch. She had a table the shape of a spool of thread, possibly a telephone-wire spool. I loved this. It reminded me of dolls' houses or of the scene in Dumbo with the mouse's things: a spool for a table! But this spool was grownup sized, and I could be the mouse. I liked all the things she asked me, all the things she wanted me to do; I liked her; I liked having her attention all to myself all afternoon. Her warm focus felt like sunlight.

I remember that in the winter she killed herself, and I overheard hushed, lost talk at the havurah about car exhaust and the note she left, and where could she be buried, and about her parents' grief. I remember asking my mother why she did that and my mother saying that sometimes people hurt and feel sad in a way that they think will never go away.

posted by Rosasharn 9:43 PM
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