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 04, 2002

I remember Bridge for Juniors. My parents were taking bridge lessons with the Herings -- it seemed an adult thing to do at the time, actually a Wasp thing to do, like mixed drinks. At some point that was what you did as an adults. And they got me a bridge-teaching game called Bridge for Juniors which consisted of a board on which you set your cards down, a deck of small thick cardboard cards, maybe two-inches square, with four suits that were different colored fruits -- I remember the purple plums -- and four wooden racks (like the racks in Scrabble) for putting your cards in. The dummy's cards were face out. You figured out trumps like whist, at random: that is to say there was no bidding, which made the game rather unlike bridge. I never quite understood what the grown-ups could be learning, until my (downtown) grandmother explained bidding to me. She was an expert bridge player -- she had enough points to qualify as a life-master -- and bridge gave her an enormous amount of intelletual sustenance ever since I knew her. It turned that she'd been brought up to think cards were an evil, but my grandfather, a one-time gambler, card-player and backgammon player (he of the two opening moves convention in chess) convinced her that cards were ok, and although they had a difficult marriage -- he was a difficult man -- she was always grateful to him for opening up this life-long recreation for her. She would get very frustrated with me for not understanding bidding conventions, which she tried to teach me too fast -- the Stayman convention, as I recall. I could never figure out whether the rules for bidding based on point counting that she taught me were actual rules, or simply what you were trying to convey to your partner. She kept saying they were actual rules, but I didn't see how they could be enforced -- clearly we had deeply different philosophical views as to what a rule was. She was always disappointed that I never learned to play well: for her the game was of an extraordinary intellectual sustenance.

I remember that my uptown grandfather also played bridge. (It turned out that in Vienna in the thirties he actually played with Bertolt Brecht.) I thought of the two of them -- my father's father and my mother's mother -- as the bridge players and imagined that they had this in common. But he played a very different game, with three other old people who would come to his house on Sundays and play bridge for change and drink coffee mit Schlag -- mainly Schlag I think. I was always proud of how old my grandfather was, but there was one old lady who came to play who was even older than he was. My grandmother didn't know how to play at all, and didn't care, so I would spend time with her while the others played.

I remember that my downtown grandparents also taught me a cardgame called "Tatch," I think Yugoslav for touch. It was I guess a version of gin rummy, except you couldn't see your cards -- you just turned over the top card and tried to get rid of cards by making runs onto your opponents cards or onto a discard pile. If you touched the wrong card your opponent would call "Tatch!" and force you to play it. I guess it was a game about being caught up in patterns of play, because the intellectual content of the game was not very high.

posted by william 2:25 PM
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