Stingy Kids

Franz and Edith

I just read something astounding:

Just two years [after his honeymoon] Franz Rosenzweig was diagnosed with a form of progressive paralysis. Although he eventually lost all movement and power of speech, he kept producing eminent works of scholarship. During this time, the role of his wife Edith cannot be overstated. When he was still able to write on his typewriter, she made all the necessary corrections and managed conversations between him and his numerous visitors. She also took over the teaching of Hebrew at the Lehrhaus. Close to the end of his life, he was only able to move his eyes. Edith would go through the alphabet and he would blink at the desired character and then she would be able to guess the word. Through this slow process, they constructed words and paragraphs. [via]

The Window

you are my bread
and the hairline noise
of my bones
you are almost
the sea

you are not stone
or molten sound
I think
you have no hands

this kind of bird flies backwards
and this love
breaks on a windowpane
where no light talks

this is not the time
for crossing tongues
(the sand here
never shifts)

I think
tomorrow
turned you with his toe
and you will
shine
and shine
unspent and underground

—by Diana di Prima

(from her first book This Kind of Bird Flies Backward, published in 1958)

Coração Selvagem

This evening the Center for Jewish History celebrated the work of Brazilian novelist Clarice Lispector. Gregory Rabassa read excerpts of his translation of A maçã no escuro, prefacing his reading with eloquent commentary on "the task of the translator." His first remark was that he always strives for literal translations of titles, as a gesture of deferral to the original. The Apple in the Dark. One strives for literality in general, he argued, in order to bring forth a work as close to the original as possible. "You can always find an English word...it's in there, sometimes you just have to tease it out."

After Rabassa's reading and a lecture by Earl Fitz ("Clarice Lispector and the Politics of Dislocation: Ways of Being Jewish in Brazil"), they showed a video of Júlio Lerner's 1977 interview with Lispector, one of the few televised appearances she made. She chain-smoked through the entire thing. It's amazing that she consented to Lerner's interviewer. She disliked "explaining" her work but that didn't stop journalists from trying to get her to do so. This snippet from her 1976 interview with José Castello gives some idea of how prickly she could be (and how redundant the questions):

JC: Why do you write?
CL: I'll answer you with another question—why do you drink water?
JC: Why do I drink water? Because I'm thirsty.
CL: In other words you drink water so that you won't die. Well, me too, I write to stay alive.

[Allow me to interject here with another memorable interview, this one from The Red Shoes:

Boris Lermentov: Why do you want to dance?
Victoria Page: Why do you want to live?
Boris Lermentov: I don't know exactly why, but I must.
Victoria Page: That's my answer, too.]

When Lerner caught up to her, she had just finished The Hour of the Star, a work that she expected would be her last. "It's a story of a girl so poor that she only ate hot dogs. But the history is not that, no. It's the story of an abused innocence and a nameless misery." She was dying of cancer and did die, a few months later. The interview covers familiar ground: her family background, the origin of her writing life, the difficulty of her texts, and her relation to other Latin American writers. Lerner asks questions he must have known she wouldn't answer, but ventured regardless, I think, for the impressive silence before she says "I'd rather not answer."

Bauby

Far from such din, when blessed silence returns, I can listen to the butterflies that flutter inside my head. To hear them, one must be calm and pay close attention, for their wingbeats are barely audible. Loud breathing is enough to drown them out. This is astonishing: my hearing does not improve, yet I hear them better and better. I must have butterfly hearing.—Jean-Dominique Bauby

A couple of months ago I read The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (trans. Jeremy Leggatt), Jean-Dominique Bauby's lyrical testimony of life with (and in) paralysis. In 1995, Bauby, who at the time was editor-in-chief of Elle magazine, suffered a massive stroke while driving his car and fell into a coma for several days. He awoke inside a body that he could no longer feel or move--with the exception of one blinking eye. "Locked-in Syndrome," as it is called, is very rare and leaves those afflicted fully conscious of the world outside of their bodies. Some can even hear, smell and see (as in Bauby's case) but they are unable to communicate. There are studies underway to see if it is possible to translate human thought into human language, thereby making it possible for those "locked-in" to communicate with the outside world. But funding for this research is scarce, as you can imagine. Patients with total paralysis often and quickly succumb to a variety of infections and illnesses brought on by too little movement and too many machines.

I understand that it took Bauby six months to compose this book. He would spend hours developing a text in his mind, striving for utmost precision so that the transmission of his words would be as fluent as possible. Claude Mendibil, to whom the book is dedicated, would recite the French alphabet, beginning with the most frequently occurring letters ESARIN TULOM (ETAOIN SHRDLU, for Anglophones) and gradually the story unfolded: "...Claude is reading out these pages we have patiently extracted from the void every afternoon for the last two months. Some pages I am pleased to see again. Others are disappointing. Do they add up to a book?" The question of genre that Bauby's doubt raises is fascinating. I have seen the book subtitled "A Memoir of Life in Death" but I don't believe that the French original included this label (nor did the first United States edition I read). A more appropriate subtitle (though one isn't necessary) would have been "The Mind's Scrapbook" ("As I listen to Claude, I study her dark hair, her very pale cheeks, which sun and wind have scarcely touched with pink, the long bluish veins on her ands, and the articles scattered about the room. I will put them in my mind's scrapbook as reminders of a summer of hard work.") In the final pages, Bauby describes the contents of Mendibil's purse, which lies open in plain view, "a hotel room key, a metro ticket, and a hundred-franc note folded in four like objects brought back by a space probe sent to earth to study how earthlings live, travel, and trade with one another." These scattered objects, like fragments of memory, comprise and organize the content of the work. They are contained (the purse, the book) but the nature of their interrelation is not always clear (the "hundred-franc note folded in four" still puzzles me).

I am a slow reader and I have been for years. I used to check out stacks of books at the library and devour them in one weekend. Now I consider myself lucky to finish a book in week (that is, the kind of book which does not require that I hold a pen in my hand). Maybe studying literature professionally has made me compulsive about the little details. Or maybe I have internalized the lessons of my teachers. The professor who taught me Don Quixote surprised us with a brutal reading quiz, which I failed with a 48%. His questions seemed to assume that we were endowed with eidetic memory. The one I remember to this day is "What are the ingredients in the balsam of Fierabras?" I had no idea. He was horrified that all of us had failed to remember this. "It made him throw up! How can you forget that?!" (The day we finished the novel, he read the last chapter out loud and cried. He said that the terrible thing about reading el Quixote year after year was reaching the moment when you had to bury your friend.) Caryl Emerson says that the novel is a world with no inconsequential details. The balsam of Fierabras: aceite, vino, sal y romero.*

That being said, I finished The Diving Bell and the Butterfly in two days, reading portions of it like a volume of poems. It's interesting to read a book with the prior knowledge that the author's very body has informed its structure, and indeed, the relation between body and text is fundamental to the poetics of the work. There is no word that is not shaped in some way by paralysis, desire and the five senses.

Christopher Reeve, in his public appearances following his accident, spoke in slow and very measured sentences. The labored interruption of breath became a part of his manner of speaking. The memory of Reeve's voice influenced the way I read this book, for the better. Try as you read to stop and breathe deeply every few words before you continue, not with a poem (which often does require this) but with novel like Don Quixote. This would approximate (though very inadequately) the experience of dictating a book through a respirator. I can't think of any parallel for blinking as dictation.

* Olive oil, wine, salt and rosemary. Take in very small dosages, preferably with bread and a mesclun salad.

Slow Down

Fragment posts, a song lyric ("Send in the Clowns" was the most recent), a picture of a cat, "the most ridiculous details of one whimsical mind." Bluedawn is one of those blogs that makes me feel like a (benign) stalker. It's co-authored by Lisa Nola and her boyfriend Adam, both of whom would be utter strangers to me were it not for Jane's blogroll. I no longer read many personal blogs, but I keep returning to bluedawn because Lisa tells wonderful stories (Adam rarely posts. He makes wonderful music.).

This week, Lisa wrote about storytelling, inspired by a This American Life episode (2/25, "Remember Me"). I'll share a quote from her post (2/27):

when you're in it, it's so hard to see the magic --that each of us are magic. last night, our regular homeless guy came in (he has a mental illness which prevents him from being understood by anyone). he often seems out of it, perhaps schizophrenic. he wanders back and forth through the club asking folks for money --though no one understands what he's asking for so they just walk away -- or he talks to walls. i should ask him to leave, but i can't seem to do it (another reason why i don't make such a good club manager). for a brief moment last night and by accident...this gentleman got on our stage by himself --in his roaming he landed there--the spotlight on him--the disco ball lighting the room in the dark--and he began to dance --a simple movement back and forth while looking up at the disco ball. for the time he seemed happy.

This post brings to mind (again) Jane Mead and her poem "Passing a Truck Full of Chickens at Night on Highway Eighty," which is also about being arrested in the moment, among other things. It also recalled "The Saw Lady," my favorite subway performer. I've only seen her once but she remains unforgettable. I've never regretted letting the 1, 9 go by--twice--without me just so I could hear the rest of her song.

Links:

*StoryCorps
* Remember the dancing baby?
* "Y nada más" (by Silvio Rodriguez)