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

Thursday, April 02, 2015

I remember one of the first large jigsaw puzzles I had was of Big Ben. I remember my parents got it to for me in England, where they went the summer I was five or so. Big Ben and London Busses: I became aware of them the first time from the presents my parents brought back from that trip. My downtown grandmother started working on it with me, but as with all the jigsaws she thought would be a good idea, we never got very far. (I am not sure I completed a thousand piece jigsaw puzzle till college or so.) What mattered was the photo on the box. Later I had jigsaws of Swiss mountain scenes, brought to me by my uptown grandmother, I think -- she loved Switzerland and loved going there. In fact I associate both my grandmothers with jigsaw puzzles, and can't be sure which puzzles went with which grandmother. It might be that they both thought of them as a way to keep me quiet for a while.

I remember I liked the cardboard, unlaminated back of the puzzle pieces but hated how sometimes they wouldn't be properly separated, so that I would have to pull them apart to make the puzzle fair. But when you did that, you'd sometimes pull part of the surface picture with it, so you'd get a piece with some of the glossy figure gone, hanging as a flimsy wisp off the top of some other piece. I realized that completing the puzzle (but I never did!) would fix that, but it was still frustrating and wrong.

I think one thing I liked about puzzles is that it was something everyone did, like Christmas, like having grandparents whose first language was English, so they were very American in a way that I never felt we quite were with my parents and grandparents being immigrants and refugees. We had as much title to the puzzles as anyone else because their subjects were individual. There wasn't one American subject. Americans did jigsaws, and we did too, and the ones we did had European scenes so we had title to them, and because they were jigsaws we had title to being American as well. And even when we did American scenes, like the Grand Canyon (again I think I first became aware of it in a jigsaw), they seemed European, the kinds of places one's grandparents would visit and be enthusiastically experienced about. (I remember my downtown grandparents visiting Hawaii one year, and how Hawaii struck me the same way. Later, when they started spending time in Miami, it felt that way too, until I visited.)

posted by William 5:32 AM
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