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

Friday, February 11, 2011

I remember the photo restoration shop on the East side of Broadway that I would always pass on my way home from the Hotel Bretton Hall. They showed before and after sepia photos, with amazing results. But what I remember about it most was the card in the window, assuring immigrants with tattered photos (I now realize) that: WIR SPRECHEN DEUTSCH / SE HABLA ESPAÑOL and then the same in Cyrillic. I somehow knew that "se" could not mean "we" and I was distressed by the fact that there wasn't a one-to-one correspondence between the assurances on this cardboard Rosetta Stone. I so wanted the Cyrillic, which my grandparents and mother could read, to just fall into place, word for word. But if didn't.

I remember finding a teach-yourself-Russian book at about the same time at our house, when I was eight or nine, and racking my brains over trying to learn the Cyrillic alphabet, but failing. The book was a black hardcover, printed on cheap paper. The lists of letters were set down in columns. But the book didn't give you any exercises, and somehow it was impossible to test yourself. And the photography shop might be able to restore what was lost, but it couldn't give me the Cyrillic I never had.

posted by William 9:12 AM
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