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, April 02, 2007

I remember Erev Pesach in the Old City. The amazing thing was that you didn’t have to do this crazy house-turn-over, where you put away all your regular dishes and cutlery and pots and pans and got out all the Pesach dishery, the way we did in America, dragging box after box down from the attic. In the Old City, we put our glass dinnerware & drinking glasses, and our metal pots and pans, and all the cutlery into the plastic baskets we used to carry fruit and veg home from the shuk (usually Mahane Yehuda) and carried them to a courtyard where bearded men and sidelocked boys had huge vats of hot water going over big fires at a furiously hot rolling boil. It was a beautiful day, sunny, and the streets were wet from the water of people's mopping and scrubbing. Everyone, the whole neighborhood, brought dishes and utensils, and we kashered them there, quicksmart, in those vats. It took mere seconds. Nothing like those hours and days of up and down, packing and unpacking. I remember the boys in their arba kanfot, running up and down, calling, helping people carry, curly payos flying behind them. I felt their energy and freedom. We waited a minute until our things were kosher, and then we took them back home and put them away in their own clean and newly lined cupboards and drawers.

posted by Rosasharn 4:02 PM
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