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, May 08, 2007

I remember the thrill of my mother opening the rarely-opened cupboard in my room. Our baby-record diaries, carefully filled out for some pages (immunization, footprints, first words), but mostly empty. I wished I could complete them. Photo albums of my parents' vacations pre-me -- Kashmir most distinctly, perhaps also Ooty and Mysore -- and of my first two years, which were all alluring in their being from a time before my memory, and being mostly locked away. (All other photographs were at my grandmothers', on open shelves, so I naturally took them for granted.)

Although I looked at the Kashmir photos every chance I got, I don't remember now any details of scenery. Lots of mountains, of course, and I think I remember what my mother wore. But I remember sensing its extreme distance -- geographically as well as its lack of resemblance to anywhere I'd been to, the feeling that the insurgencies, starting as they did only a little after I was born, would not end for a very long time, and the fact that my parents were there only two years before I was born and that I had hence just missed it.

And it made me sadder to have the albums locked up, because the photographs were the only claim I had to any memory, past or future, of the place. I was afraid the cupboard would lose them.

posted by sravana 9:47 PM
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