Lector in Fabula: The Poet’s Notebooks Opening the Memory Chamber: Scar Tissue, Testimony, Beauty

Lecteur fable: cahier de du

Theoria [L. theoria, a theory, from Gr. Theoria, a looking at, from theoreo, to see, from theoros, an observer.] A supposition explaining something; a doctrine or scheme of things resting merely on speculation; hypothesis; plan or system suggested… Scar n. 1. The mark left on the skin after the healing of a wound or sore; a cicatrix. 2. Any mark, damage or lasting effect from past injury, stress.
Testimony 1. A statement or affirmation of a fact, as before a court. 2. Evidence; proof; also the aggregate of proof offered in a case. 3. The act of testifying; attestation. 4. Public declaration regarding some experience. 5. The Old Testament Scriptures of the Decalogue. [< L testimonium < testis witness. Testament: as in last will and testament. Words to die in.
Beauty the quality attributed to whatever pleases the senses or mind, as by line, color, form, texture, proportion, rhythmic motion, tone, etc., or by behavior, attitude. *** Cartography I once believed that one word had the power to change things. That language was a skin we could inhabit. Now I know that poems are theories, carving memory into the long spine of history. We are caught in the throat, voicing the hours. And the poet's exile is pure sound at the scarred edges of the world's body.
Country, nation, history. I am changing the story. My hand is moving across your page and it is in the mapping of your bones and sinews that I find the words: grief, love, beauty, testament. Your mouth yields the vermilion fruit of the word home. Let me die here.

Lector in Fabula
I am reading in a school of dreams, a lost girl in a night's tale, wandering through a jardin d'essais, underfoot, the crunch of pale green lichen on the forest floor.
Hyacinth gardens fade into a scene of city lights and I am on Vancouver's Hasting's Street. The pages become stained with east end rot, humanity pumping heroin through collapsed veins and there on the corner is a woman weeping, the sound of her pain palpable in every crack of concrete, a prostitute whose knees have been broken by a man with a baseball bat. I take her by the hand and take her home with me, wash her body and her crushed limbs, her sore-covered feet. I try to absorb her fever in my touch, lay her down to sleep in my bed.
In the morning when I wake, she is gone, only a cool, clear light shining on the tumbled sheets.
Tonight, I'll turn the pages of the book again my hands inside the spine, reading the places where memory doesn't work. ***

Scordatura
The posturing glitterati at the art gallery chatter in front of Edvard Munch's sick children suffering men and women agonized souls.

Strange Fruit
Sun streaming across classroom desks. Textbooks splayed open. I have assigned a quote from the text, asking for response to the list of qualities essential for the effective teacher of literature. The book tells my students that they must be risk-takers, subversive, that they must read gladly and openly, for this is their best hope of introducing others to literature. We use the book's language, critical thinking, socio-political thought, the English teacher as subversive.
Chalk dust powders my hands, the walls echo loud chatter until Luz reads her response: During the civil war in El Salvador in the 1980s it was not unusual to find teachers of literature hanging from trees.
The room weeps. My spine slips, throat closes. In this classroom, the dark fields of history loom, edgelit with outrage and the knowledge that language is always culpable.
Textbooks are momentarily discarded.

Angelus Novus
Glorious autumnal skies. Cathedrals of light. First day of classes at the university. In another city an uncertain wind howls into dissonance. It is not the faces of my students I remember that day, but the sheer and immense futility of speech. My words stones in my throat. How to teach about literature, about poetry, when the book opens to such a page, blackened by the charred wings of the angel of history.
After this eleventh day in September, there are those fashioning crosses from twigs, praying to angels with persistence. It is not the faces of the victims that haunt me, nor the ruined avenues, or the steel towers in flame. Not the widows' anguish. Not the violinist on the front page of the newspaper, tears streaming down her face as she plays a fugue. Not the powdered bone or seared flesh, not the face of hatred.
It is the shoes that I remember, the shoes that haunt me, falling everywhere like rain from the towers, people running out of their shoes, rows of fireman's boots abandoned, a woman's high heel, everywhere shoes in that smoldering ash, full lives still hissing O remember me I walked here. This speech of common steps propelling us into the future.
I have no words for this, no speech for my students in the world's hours of occlusion. What can I say -that darkness reveals beauty? That terror will yield beauty and clear-sightedness? I cannot stand at a lectern-professing. I can say nothing.
Yet I stand with them in classrooms day after day, trying to write a new page with them. Something that recalls beauty to the mortal, the imperfect, the guilty. Something that speaks of stars falling on the city. Something that is dream-cut, embossed onto cream-laid papers, my poem for them, born of remembrances of those ashen footprints vanishing from the air. Something that would allow us all to die in full desire.
Something that would calm the stormwinds blowing in from Paradise. Something that would heal those scorched wings, allow the angel to close them, fold them gently back into the dark waters of our hearts.

Somewhere, a woman is writing a poem
Somewhere, a woman is writing a poem in the twilight hours of history, lavender turning to ash, as time spills over and the moon unfurls her white-pitched fever in the songs of jasmine winds. The young woman I was climbs the stairs, the moon's pale alphabet filling her. She tucks her child into bed, bends over her desk in the yellow lamplight, frees her hand to write, breaking through the page like that Dorothea Tanning painting where the artist's hand gashes through the canvas, fingers and wrist plunged to the bone. She writes a dark, erotic psalm, an elegy, a poem to grow old in, a poem to die in.
Somewhere, a woman is writing a poem, as she gives a way the clothes of her dead loved ones, stretching crumpled wings, her words rise liquid in the air, rosaries of prayer for the dying children, for the ones who have disappeared, the desaparecido, and for the ones who have been murdered. She writes through the taste of fear and rage and fury. She writes in milk and blood, her ink fierce and iridescent, rooted in love. Somewhere, a woman who thought she could say nothing is writing a poem and she will sing forever, blooming in the dark madness of the world. ***

"The Lost Language of Cranes II" Suzanne Northcott
The Lost Language of Cranes I For if Hiroshima in the morning, after the bomb has fallen, Is like a dream, one must ask whose dream it is.

Peter Schwenger, Letter Bomb: Nuclear Holocaust and the Exploding Word
Reading with my daughter the story of Sadako and the Thousand Cranes. Rachel loves to tell the story of the little Japanese girl who is almost two when the bomb explodes a mile from her home in Hiroshima.
They run, fleeing to the banks of the River Ota drenched by the black rain, falling, falling.
When she is twelve years old, Sadako runs like the wind in school relay races best runner in the sixth grade, until she falters her body gnawed away by leukemia, Atomic Bomb Disease.
In the hospital, her friends remind her of the Tsuru, the crane Japanese symbol of long life, of hope.
If you fold a thousand cranes. they will protect you from illness, grant you a wish.
Sadako tells the cranes I will write peace on your wings and you will fly all over the world Sadako begins folding, folding fragments of newspapers, discarded wrappers from her medicines, making tiny paper cranes, folding, folding Sadako's mother writes: If she has to suffer like this, she should have died that morning on August 6 th .
She watches her daughter, her painstaking folding. She buys a bolt of silk fabric printed with cherry blossoms, makes a kimono to enfold her child.
Sadako's small fingers folding, folding day after day. She makes 644 cranes before she dies. Her classmates complete her thousand cranes, place them in her coffin, as if her heart would continue to beat in the paper wings.
Her mother wraps her daughter in the softness of silk, in the cherry blossom kimono, lays flowers in the coffin with the birds, so that her child can bring them with her to the next world.
Sadako's mother asks the birds: Why didn't you sing? Why didn't you fly?

A cemetery seen from the air is a child's city.
Carolyn Forché, "The Garden Shukkei-en" I watch my daughter and her friends folding tiny origami cranes for their class project, winged symbols of peace, spread rainbow-hued across the kitchen table.
The paper birds criss-cross the earth correspondences for peace projects, their hopeful wings trying to speak the horrors of war amidst the cheery optimism of chalkboards and classrooms.
The children will send the paper cranes in garlands of a hundred birds each to the mayor of Hiroshima, to be placed with millions of paper cranes at the foot of the Children's Monument where the stone figure of Sadako holds a large golden crane above her head, arms outstretched to the sky.
I watch my children play and wonder if the power of birds will stand strong against exploding words and mushroom clouds against the screams that reverberate in the silence of Hiroshima's Peace Park.

After I noticed the flash, white clouds spread over the blue sky. It was as if blue morning glories had suddenly bloomed… Testimony of Isao Kita
By the banks of the river Ota, where Sadako used to play in the Garden Shukkei-en, stands a stone angel holding an origami crane.
Hibakusha, survivors who are still alive wander the garden, across the pond on the Kokoukyo Bridge, through tea ceremonies and the blossomings of plums and cherries and irises.
In the garden, the silence, the insistence of memory, the flash of light, the burning heat, the shattering of glass, everywhere the cries of children calling for their mothers.
Bodies stripped naked by the blast, skin peeling, hanging from fingertips like cloth, mothers holding dying children in their arms, trying in vain to pluck away the swarming maggots. Sometimes in the shallow waters of these wetlands, the cranes dance, sending waves flying, a language of ancient memories, a language that teaches us that after grief, it is possible to love again, a music we have forgotten, such sheer joy.
When the cranes lift in ascent, cathedrals of wind rise in their wingbones, estuaries of morning light lifting across continents, a white front of radiance, their cries like clouds of desire.
After, in the presence of still waters, you can rest in the white light, in the grace of wings.

Manifesto
Amidst its provocations, what does this art make possible?
It makes it possible, in the poet's notebooks and beyond, to imagine this curriculum vitae, the course of a life that becomes poetry. This poem is a location for the beautiful, for convulsive beauty, the surrealist manifesto in which oppositional forces reside alongside each other. Beauty that is often difficult, falling just short of fear. The beauty of the world is found edged with the scar tissue of history, a cicatrix that knows the borderlines of terror. Yet, amidst the dark fields of history, the embrace of beauty can be education. This beauty is found in our constant revision and interrogation of our own positions in relation to others, so that our minds and hearts and empathies are opened to others. This is what poetry proposes: love, beauty, knowledge, faith, testaments for living alongside terror. Beauty and terror hand in hand in our own desires and daily lives. We endure this. Poetry confronts terror, makes it habitable knowledge, beautiful.
This art makes it possible to imagine a curriculum phrased as a gift to a newborn. A deep song that begins and ends with the word love. To make this poem, cradle it in our hands. It will end with the word love, a true sentence for greeting a newborn. A lullaby.
"Lector in Fabula.." The title of this poem is borrowed from Umberto Eco's book Lector in Fabula, (1979). Milano: Bompiani. The title is translated as The Reader in the Story. Eco's theoretical discussions consider the role of the reader as active agent in the construction and imagination of an author's text.
The poems "Vespers," and "Scordatura" are reprinted from Dunlop, R. (2002). The Body of My Garden. Toronto, Mansfield Press, with permission of the author and the publisher.
"Scordatura." The title refers to the mistuning or alternate tuning of a string instrument to achieve unconventional sonorities and chords. Often used in 18 th century music in notations for the viola d'amore.
"English Education" is for Carla Mancini.
"Strange Fruit" is for Luz Minero.
Epigraph by Walter Benjamin is from "Theses on the Philosophy of History" Part IX, in Illuminations, edited and translated by Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken Books, pp.257-258.

Notebook 4 The Lost Language of Cranes
Art by Suzanne Northcott. Section I: "The Lost Language of Cranes II," 24"x ,24" mixed media on wood. "The Lost language of Cranes I," (detail) 12" x 48," mixed media on wood. Section II "The Lost Language of Cranes I," (detail) 12" x 48," mixed media on wood.
Section III "The Lost Language of Cranes I," (detail) 12" x 48," mixed media on wood.
Section IV "The Lost Language of Cranes III," 12" x 48," mixed media on wood.
"The Lost Language of Cranes." An earlier version of this poem appeared in JCT, Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, Vol.18, No.1, Spring 2002, pp.109-115. Segments of this poem were inspired and informed by Carolyn Forché's poems, "The Garden of Shukkei-en," and "Testimony of Light" in her collection The Angel of History, New York: HarperCollins, 1994.
Hibakusha: The first atomic bomb used in wartime was dropped in Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, killing between 130,000 and 150,000 people by the end of that year. The term hibakusha refers to survivors of the Atomic Bomb. Those who survived the bombing are aging rapidly now after struggling for many years. Segments of this poem are informed by the testimonies collected and videotaped by the Hiroshima Peace and Culture Foundation to commemorate the International year of Peace in 1986.
Excerpts referring to Sadako Sasaki's mother, Fujiko Sasaki, are based on a letter titled, "Come Back to Me Sadako," from Record of Atomic Bombs in Japan by Seishi Toyota, Nihon Tosho Center, 1991.
When Sadako died on October 25, 1955, her classmates folded the missing paper cranes to make a thousand and placed them in the coffin with Sadako's body. Since then the paper crane has become an international symbol of nuclear disarmament.
Sadako's friends and classmates collected Sadako's letters and writings and published them under the title Kokeshi, after the name of a doll they had given Sadako in the hospital. Inspired by this collection and the remarkable effect Sadako's story had on others, Eleanor Coerr wrote the powerful book, Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes, published by G.P. Putnam in 1993.
Sadako's classmates began a national campaign to build a monument in her memory. It was built to honor all children who suffered from the devastating consequences and effects of the atomic bomb. The Statue of Sadako is also known as The Children's Monument. Built in 1958 with donations from school children, the monument stands in the center of Hiroshima's Peace Park surrounded by thousands of paper cranes from people all over the world. At its base is a plaque with the following inscription: This is our cry This is our prayer Peace in the world