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Number
286
September October 2000
Trance-Siberian
Express
GARY GACH
Copyright
© 2000 Poetry Flash
THE DESIRE NOTEBOOKS, by John High, Spuyten
Duyvil, P.O. Box 1852, Cathedral Station, New York,
NY 10025, 289 pages, 1999, $29.95 cloth, $14.95
paper. Photographs from the Sovfoto/Eastfoto
Archives.
The collapse of the soviet bloc was one of the
most decisive events of the past century. But where
shall we turn for in-depth testimony?
Western publishers have offered us literary
journalism, mostly by outsiders, from David
Remnick's Pulitzer Prize-winning Lenin's
Tomb to Mark Kramer's masterful but
under-recognized Travels with a Hungry Bear.
But outsiders can sometimes see the game better
than the players. And poetry and fiction can
provide a truthful witness (and reportage be
charged with poetry). Acclaimed American
poet-translator John High has recently offered up a
text woven during several years teaching and
translating in the ex-USSR in the early nineties.
Surprise! his report's resonant not only with
political upheaval but with a more under-reported
phenomenon: spiritual re-awakening.
A swirl of prose and prose-poetry,
Notebooks opens in medias res on a
train, its protagonists, an unnamed man and woman,
simultaneously traversing Russia and Russia's
metaphysical heritage, amid social chaos. People
try to get out, or in. Early on, a face in the
crowd is crushed on the tracks. The train cannot be
stopped, nor can the lovers, nor the Russian
spirit; the human spirit, I should say.
High's treatment of this love-among-the-ruins
motif echoes the stream-of-consciousness of
Marguerite Duras's Hiroshima Mon Amour and
the layered poetry of Michael Ondaatje's The
English Patient. But High's technique is even
more fragmented, and in his complex polyphony of
voice, high stylistic innovation, and mystical
aesthetic, he sometimes echoes that great writer of
landscape and loss, Edmond Jabès.
Indeed, Notebooks pushes the envelope---mingling
narrative, memoir, epistle, poetry, and mythopoeia.
Lush, languid, poignant, funky, elegiac, prayerful,
his highly personal, impressionistic style is in a
line with experimental belle lettrists Virginia
Woolf, Vladimir Nabokov, and Julio Cortázar;
more recently, Carole Maso, say.
Plot alone doesn't unify such work; form and
voice and style do too. For a taste, here's a
fragment from the final section of
Notebooks:
Now it has come down to this. This dream of
Fathers, she had told him while in the dream,
slinging her fingers across her pregnant mouth,
almost touching the monks as she did. The black
tracks and blue hills of the metropolis, the
emptiness in these afternoon clouds, she told him.
Now it has come down to just this dream, you
understand. Do you know what I mean?
He picked the sentence from her mouth and
devoured it as the sentence began to speak without
her, saying: if you want to find the meaning,
stop chasing after things...
(page 258)
Note how the absence of quotation marks blurs
narration and dialogue, amplifies the effect of
being awake within (or eavesdropping upon) a
dream---or a dream within a dream---and so makes
each phrase more emblematic, vocable, musical. It
has come down to the unsayable. And so poetry is
called as witness.
The result is not to be mistaken as 'poetic',
but is, rather, active poetry; an expanded prose
poem. To ask if her lips are pregnant---or
swollen---because she is pregnant, may be valid,
but falls short of participating in metaphor's use
of words to evoke what words cannot say. Similarly,
for analogy: are her teeth "monks"? Landscape is
condensed into sparse images: black tracks, blue
hills, etc. The clouds reflect further sensibility;
namely, emptiness---heavenly messengers bearing no
message.
High has a fine ear, right down to how Russians
will choose a European word like "metropolis," but
will also lard speech with those little refrains
that make up any foreigners' insufficient
vocabulary: e.g., you know what I mean?
The man listens to the woman's sentences with
his mouth, as well as his ear---as we would be,
saying them aloud. (O say, and taste. O taste, and
see.) Thus attuned to sight, sound, and sense, the
next sentence, one paragraph unto itself, is the
payoff. (Do we know what she means?) No
transcendent answer but in things as they are. The
miracles and pleasures of mere being, here and
now.
Phrase-slinging like this attunes us to cadences
of speech and the possibilities they
envision. It's like a word-sushi whose raw fish can
still quiver or throb in your mouth, or your
heart.
Triumph of style over substance? Certainly, many
will find this kind of fare too obscure, while
others will join the growing ranks of the book's
hard-core fans (VLS recently named The Desire
Notebooks to its Favorite 25 of the year). But
adventuresome readers might wish a map first,
having perhaps struggled ten times with, say,
The Sound and the Fury before grasping the
outline and returning then to simply enjoy it.
Fair enough. So here's our 'Crib's Notes' of the
elliptical and hermetic narrative thread; just
enough plot not to get in the way of the story:
just enough to enable the reader to delve deeper
and appreciate the poetry, the language.
The woman is the focus of the first of the
book's three sections. She's boarded a train,
fleeing the malevolent brutalism gripping Chechnya,
Sarajevo, etc. Along with monks and gypsies, she
has as a traveling companion a former priest, a
partisan fighting the fascists. Together, they're
translating a notebook she's smuggling, which,
we'll learn, contains secrets of a mysterious
religious sect, the Ezekiel tribe, preaching mutual
aid and eternal love in the face of eternal
suffering. Meanwhile, high on morphine, she's dying
of cancer, and without memory (for reasons
explained further on). On the fifty-second day, he
buries her, and yet their story continues.
The second section shifts to the man's point of
view. We learn of her past in a secret monastery,
with her father and former husband. When the
protagonist met her, soldiers had wiped the
monastery out. The two of them plotted revenge. She
was to seduce the fascists to a club and strip for
them, then duck out while the man set off a bomb.
But it backfired, and her daughter burned to death
(hence her amnesia).
Back in the present tense, the man finally finds
the secret monastery, and in the final section the
monks have their say. Peter falls from the sky to
welcome in the new millennium. His brethren are
eternal, name-swapping, time-hopping
monks---Ezekiel, Sisdel, Mika, and Virgil. Since
Stalin, each is missing some bodily part or
function (eyes, hands, memory, etc.) which the
others provide. At the end of each century, two
living people have to replace them, so they can
continue traveling to places of destruction to
heal.
The unnamed man has morphed into Peter, and the
woman into fisherwoman Hezhen, part witch, part
mother of us all. Ever-present is an angelic guide,
a one-eyed boy named Thomas. Here and there, an
American stumbles in and out; the author, probably.
Oh, and there are vampires, and a talking crow
named Tikho.
The book ends at the source, as they all gather
at the river; and the unsayable mystery of the
notebooks, in which the initial pair of lovers are
inscribed, is held within the pages of
Notebooks itself.
And in making us aware of the miracle that
Russia still exists, John High simultaneously
awakens us to our own marvelous, impermanent
existence and the moments of being that move and
interweave us on our journey in a new
millennium.
Gary Gach is editor of What Book!? ~
Buddha Poems from Beat to Hiphop (American Book
Award, 1999). Creative Arts will publish his next
book of poems, Black Snow.
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