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

Sunday, June 06, 2010

I remember my mother rewarding or offering rewards to us if we were "especially good." I loved that word and still do: it's a word that she owned, for me. When we used the phrase, bargaining with her, we felt close to her (which was the point, the approach we were making, the earnest we were offering in the negotiation). "Can we go out for pizza if we're especially good?" I didn't recognize, of course, the kind implication that we were pretty good anyhow. It meant to me (and maybe was supposed to) that just being good, which would already be an effort, wasn't good enough. I think now it was both. At any rate, the word almost always makes her vivid to me.

The fact that English was basically a third language for both my parents, that they talked in another language with their parents who often talked still other languages with their friends, was a dim background to my sense of her highly literate adult vocabulary. It was as though adulthood were her native language, or her destined language rather. The babble of little-kid English and my grandparents' heavily accented English, German, Yugoslav: it was all where I lived (English primarily but not exclusively). I remember I invented a gibberish I called "Aboshab," probably like the Saturday Hebrew I knew fewer than a dozen words of. But then there was the adult language of "especially." (I'm pretty sure it was a word I also heard her using on the phone when talking with her clients about legal matters, so it was flattering to have it introduced into my own ambit.)

posted by William 12:42 PM
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# posted by Roselyn : 11:18 PM

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