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, September 25, 2012

I remember Yom Kippur at the Havurah, which was long and boring and hungry, though we brought sandwiches for my brother and me. When Young Israel was on Dunbar Street, I remember sitting with my mother, fiddling with tassels on my skirt during the interminable Musaf. I remember the first year I had to fast, days after I became Bat Mitzvah, staying in Micah and Bev's apartment in the Old City and sleeping all afternoon, feeling sick. I remember Yom Kippur at yeshiva in Jerusalem: I remember girls sitting in the black street, white dresses scattered across the four silent lanes of Rechov Herzog. If I think about it, I remember Yom Kippur at Meredith's house, before her family moved from Brooklyn to the Five Towns; I slept in her brother's room, and, during the break from Shul, I read Portnoy's Complaint. I remember Yom Kippur in Cambridge: waiting out the last few minutes of the fast with Steve and Gil and Gil's sister Tamar, and, a few years later, pregnant, walking home up Oxford Street.

posted by Rosasharn 10:23 AM
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