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, March 26, 2013

I remember a few early Passover celebrations (they blur together as one; maybe I am remembering only one) when both sets of grandparents were there, I think at my uptown grandparents' house, before they broke with each other. (My downtown grandfather's funeral might have been the first time they all got together after the break.)

After that we sometimes had Passover at my uptown grandparents' house; Passovers with my downtown grandparents were often at our own house, but sometimes at theirs. What I particularly remember was the way the males did the Seder and so were responsible for controlling the meal. This was counter to almost every other night, where they just sat there accepting whatever their wives arranged.

My downtown grandfather and my father were both interested in the ritual. It was as though matzoh were some magical implement that made them experts, at least compared to the rest of us. They knew the blessings, they knew where the napkins went, they knew about the cup for Elijah, and so on. They decided when the meal started. My father loved singing dayenu raucously, and enlisting everyone else into singing it.

My uptown grandfather was far less interested in any of this. His attitude towards the Seder was more or less his attitude towards any other meal. My grandmother handed him something and he took it, phlegmatically. On Passover, she handed him the Seder, and he did what he was supposed to. She lit the candles first, of course, and that was the big thing. Then my grandfather stood briefly at the head of the table, did what was required of him, and sat down as she dominated the room again, and I enjoyed my 7-Up or Canada Dry Ginger Ale, and wondered about the extra desert spoons we never used laid horizontally to the north of the fine china.

posted by William 9:07 AM
. . . 0 comments

Friday, March 15, 2013

I remember when I achieved what seemed to me a kind of graciousness in dealing with my parents' demands: I could tell them things that were technically truthful, instead of lying outright, but still deceive them when necessary, which I frequently deemed it to be. But they cottoned on to this pretty quickly, and in long session of rebuke they forbade me to "give the wrong impression."

I hadn't known that there was a name for what I was doing. That somewhat compensated for the loss of this new technique for protecting myself by misleading them. It turned out that I was right to feel what I'd done as an achievement. They even told me that in legal contexts (my mother being a lawyer), "giving the wrong impression" counted as breaking the oath to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, the oath I always looked forward to seeing a new witness take on Perry Mason.

So my sense that lies were childish defenses against adult power, needed by children but not by grownups, changed a little: now it turned out there was an adult way of lying, and that I'd discovered it myself, which contributed to my pride that I was becoming an adult, a person wise in the ways of adult life. Even the fact that the agreed-on name for this kind of deceit took four words to say was a pleasure.

posted by William 11:55 PM
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