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

Monday, July 01, 2019

I remember that my father would refer to my grandmother in conversation as "my mother" (i.e. his mother). With me he used to call her by her nickname (Omama), but that slowly faded, and of course with my own mother he always called her "my mother." There was something strange about this: it was fine for him to call my grandfather "my father," and fine for my mother to call her parents "my mother" and "my father." But it didn't quite seem right for my father to have a mother the way I did, someone he called "my mother." I think the reason that the other three terms didn't bother me was that he was my father, so calling his father "my father" couldn't really overcome that eclipse. And of course my mother's father had nothing to do with the paternal side of my family. As to my mother's mother, I think my mother was so clearly my mother, and her mother was so clearly not, that it just didn't come up. Or maybe it was that my father had these relations to two mothers -- one my real mother, and the other an old, antiquated crone, waiting to tell me stories of the past, or maybe waiting for the past to come back, for the old antiquated days to come crushingly to life.

posted by William 7:13 PM
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