Swallow the World: A New Poem of Place is Coming Together
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I placed upon the crown of another an ushanka, or trapper hat, this week. This recent memory of raising my hands while holding the fur, ear flapped hat up above their head and then lowering it down upon them is playing within my mind a looping film of visual and narrative memory.
This looping film beckons the memory of reading Salmon Rushdie's book, The Wizard of Oz. I first found this book one summer when I was passing through Madison, Wisconsin. Having watched the classic movie both as a child and an adult, I was very intrigued when I saw the thin, greenish colored book by Rushdie in a pile of others splayed across a folding metal table at a yard sale. I paid the asked for $1.00 and read the 80 page book that evening sitting on a plane headed back to Alaska.
His writing about the Wizard of Oz changed how I saw the film myself. During the cyclone window scene, towards the end of the movie, Dorothy looks out and sees cows and rooted tree trunks swirling by, Auntie Em in her rocking chair, Miss Gulch riding her bike and transforming into the Wicked Witch of the West, and the cyclone itself.
Next, we see the farmhouse being spun by the cyclone and then fall back to Earth. Dorothy and the viewer return to reality. Rushdie identifies this scene as Dorothy, and the movie goer, watching a cinematic film of her memories and experiences projected onto a movie screen we see as a window.
I rented the movie. I watched that scene carefully, then stopped the DVD and literally walked up to the screen and looked out the window as Dorothy herself was doing. I remember feeling flush with the realization that he was right!
Are the projected images aligned with the film’s script order? No. What emerges from our subconscious to our conscious mind is a non-sequential history. Memory is a deviated time line.
It made so much sense as that is how memory plays out and moves through my own mind. Too, it resonated how crafting poetry works for me; a realized connection between something in the present and a remembered experience. When one connects, the connection then multiplies into a synaptic symphony.
Dorothy wanted to go home and she does, yet did she ever leave? As the window scene continues, she is in her own bed and the central figures who where with her at home in Kansas and in Oz are now there beside her.
Another of my own memories has surfaced. Years ago when I was in San Diego visiting an Upstate, NY. friend who relocated there, I saw a young woman sitting at a coffee bar wearing a Wizard of Oz t-shirt. I commented that I liked her shirt. She replied that L. Frank Baum was her great-grandfather. She said her name was Dorothy. I can see her now, her long brown hair and the white flash of her smile. Below is a recent photo of her I found in the Coronado Times (Coronado, CA):
https://coronadotimes.com/news/2015/10/09/l-frank-baums-granddaughter-joins-celebrate-oz/
Oh, too, I remember one day riding the bus while there and a blind young man sitting in one of the designated seats for the disabled singing, Somewhere Over The Rainbow. I see him now as I saw Baum’s great-granddaughter. I was sitting nearby and starting singing along with him:
Someday I’ll wish upon a star
And wake up where the clouds are far behind me
Where troubles melt like lemon drops
Away above the chimney tops
That’s where you’ll find me
I began writing this post about gifting someone my hat and now I am walking under a remembered rainbow. Salmon Rushdie wrote, “The story you finish is never the one you began.”
Yet, the memories of my time in San Diego don’t beckon me to write a poem as an artist telling me that the sky is her ocean did.
When first hearing or seeing something which then hovers in my mind in sort of an in-between state, I don’t think of that hovering as a daydream, but instead a hazy hallucination of recollection. In Buddhism it is called bardo, the bridge between the known and the unknown. For Dorothy, bardo is the place between Kansas and Oz. It is within the cyclone.
I lowered a fur hat, that was mine, on to the head of another, as I gifted it to them, and a slow-motion scene in which a friend recently spoke to me about being laced up in her corset to dance in the Nutcracker ballet, at the age of 42, played out in my mind.
Now, I wait for the rapid blinking of my eyelids, the jarring froward from my chair or the dream that walks into the day with me so as to write the poem that will present itself in its entirety to me. It will not happen in this moment, but soon. ©
To understand just one life, you have to swallow the world.
Salman Rushdie
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