Cultivating Memories Poem by gershon hepner

Castaways upon the shores
of loneliness, we cultivate
the memories we find in ores
unmined by us until, too late,
we learn about the mother lode
that we’d been seeking, long before
our flickering spirit glowed, and flowed
towards a more familiar shore.

Inspired by Sanford Schwartz’s review of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, a film directed by Julian Schnabel, based on The Diving Bell and the Butterfly: A Memoir of Life in Death by Jean-Dominique Bauby, translated from the French by Jeremy Leggatt (“The Nerve and the Will, ” NYR, March 6,2008) :
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is based on the book of the same name by Jean-Dominique Bauby. The editor of the French fashion magazine Elle, Bauby suffered a stroke at the end of 1995, at forty-three, that left him paralyzed from head to toe and able only to use his mind, to hear from one ear (in a muffled way) , to move his head a little (with a huge effort) , to grunt out the letters of the alphabet (after considerable therapy) , and most crucially to see from his left eye and to blink its lid. A victim of what is known as locked-in syndrome, Bauby learned how to communicate through a collaborative process. As someone read to him letters of the alphabet, he would, through blinking at the letter he needed, spell out words. When the point of this process became the writing of a book about the experience Bauby was living through and what it touched off in him about other aspects of his life, his condition must have seemed a fraction less unbearable. (He died a few days after his book was published, in 1997.) Although he doesn't identify himself as a writer, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is an astonishing report from so damaged and deprived a state of being that most of us resist imagining what it would be like in such a situation. It is also, unbelievably, a wry, tender, and beautifully measured piece of writing. Knowing how he wrote, a reader can't help but linger with Bauby's every phrase. He calls his left eye 'the only window to my cell, ' and, in one of many lines that are both felicitous and reverberant, sees the sick as 'castaways on the shores of loneliness.' He turns over the recent and distant past—'I cultivate the art of simmering memories'—and especially likes to think about food and eating experiences, briskly noting, 'If it's a restaurant, no need to call ahead.'

2/29/08