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

Saturday, January 20, 2007

I remember what must be a common and unexpected benefit of city life, the way various family members were associated with baked goods from different bakeries. Because one set of grandparents lived downtown, one set uptown, and ourselves halfway between, the boxes of cookies and other treats that they would bring (or that we would buy) always came from different bakeries. The kinds of bread were not as different, but then differences in taste came up; my uptown grandparents like a sliced crusty white bread with poppy-seeds; my downtown grandparents ate more rye. But more than the bread it's the cookies I remember: they were nothing special but they were different, and the differences were special because they were part of the specificity of each of my grandmothers. A subtle aspect of that differentiation was what their friends brought them when they came over to play bridge or for coffee or tea. I got to eat those cookies too, and the two sets of bakery-brought cookies I associate with each of my grandmothers includes these other subsets as well. My parents' friends didn't bring cookies over as often, but when they did I got a sense of them, of who they were, from the way their cookies reminded me of one or the other of my grandmothers. It was odd ot go to Eclair's on 72nd street, later, and find my uptown grandmother's cookies there. They were not the cookies we bought, though -- my parents' taste seemed younger and more sophisticated, that is it stood for youth and sophistication, and we bought from a different part of the display case.

posted by william 3:39 PM
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