Living Root: A Memoir"Living Root" is by a well-known New York poet, Michael Heller. In this memoir, Heller traces his family's origins from Bialystok, Poland and then deals with growing up in America in Brooklyn and Miami Beach. Heller's poetry is the spine of the story and if you do not know it you may use this book as agent to rouse you to read his work. "Living Root" has a compelling narrative line even though his life is not the stuff of a celebrity bio-pic - though one can say that the ordinariness of his life reflects light on many other American lives, perhaps even that of most readers. I will present this book now by quoting a few sections. There are many memorable descriptions, such as the next two passages: "The house where the family lived in Bialystok, my Aunt Jen told me, was somewhat primitive. Cheap pine furniture, crude plumbing, muslin drapes, my aunt enumerated its humble inventory. At mealtimes, she remembered, food was ladled into hollowed out recesses chiseled into the wooden top of the dining table, as dishware was mainly for the wealthy." "My father…loved a good joke, took people at face value and was enthusiastic to the point of getting himself mixed up in some fantastic or slight shady schemes. In the Twenties, he'd tried to make movies in Tampa, hiring major league baseball players as stars, had sold some Florida real estate during the Boom that was half swamp and half underwater…. Much later, after I had grown up…he was still looking for some 'big' deal that would put the family in the black. After the…space flights took place, he created a business called the Galactic Interplanetary Board of Trade which sought out the endorsements of astronauts for various consumer products such as toothpaste and deodorant." ---- Heller, at the same time, achieves a weight of thought which you can discern in these four passages: "Walter Benjamin, that near-tragic wanderer in the German-Jewish diaspora who in a sense is the patron saint of this writing, wanted to 'rub history against the grain.' My own task here is rather similar, to rub story against story, to rub a life against the story's flow, to force time to jump the track of its well-grooved channel." "Thinking back, I know I had no firm conception of poetry as a child. . . . There was . . . the indirect influence of my cousin Arthur, seven years older, who lived with us and was acknowledged the smartest person in the house…. He often came at night to the bedroom I shared with my sister Tena to read portions of the Iliad to us. What I now associate with poetry, though then inarticulate, was the incredible suspense when Arthur read the seemingly endless chapter enumerating the order of battle for the Athenian army. All the foreign names and places, substantive upon substantive, noun upon noun, piled up like a towering wall of bricks awaiting that one verb to be uttered: 'struggle' or 'conflict' or 'battle.' I imagined this word to be like the shot from a starter's pistol, a miracle word which would trigger the entire verbal edifice into catastrophic motion, thus creating War itself. This, for me, was the magic of poetry - as opposed to story telling - that it came down finally to a word (or to the word that a poem was) which produced this forceful transformation, this flood of all the words and rhythms that had come before it. The strength of the accretory passages in the Homeric epic…resided in some cosmic final word, a word that would stop time in its tracks and arrest death." "Writing…creates a rebus of hope. The grammar of reality has given sway to an 'as-if' or imaginative grammar of interiority….What is this interiority? [the Russian poet, Osip] Mandelstam, in his great poetic memoir, "The Noise of Time," declares that 'my memory is inimical to all that is personal.' Yet his memoir is one of the most personal documents of twentieth-century Russian literature, charged to the utmost in every sentence and paragraph with detail, character sketch and personal impression." "…to be a supplicant before words, before combinations of word, was to gather two initimacies at once, that of the very things words named…and that of a 'renaming' - that construct of the poem which collocated all these names of things and yet held them in some new order and relationship and so constituted a new name. Here, in renaming, tradition and freedom coexisted side by side, forming a continuous juncture, which ran directly through the poet…like the living root of a plant that one unearths from the soil to examine closely, there were areas where the cellular structures of the root exchange minerals and nutrients and water with the earth, a boundary membrane where what is dead and what is alive are indistinguishable." ---- "Living Root: A Memoir" by Michael Heller - 179 pages, isbn 0-7914-4634-4 - available from www.sunypress.edu or any bookseller. |