Memory And Imagination Poem by gershon hepner

Memory And Imagination



While memory’s the diving bell
that helps us to retrieve what we have lost,
imagination breaks the spell
that freezes beauty in a permafrost,
releasing from the depths deep thoughts
that lie between tectonic plates so they
can be propelled like astronauts
who aim to go beyond the Milky Way.

Inspired by Julian Schnabel’s movie “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly”. A. O. Scott, reviewing the movie in the NYT on November 30,2007, writes:
Jean-Dominique Bauby, a French fashion magazine editor and the author of the international best seller on which “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” is based, suffered an even more extreme form of confinement. In his early 40s, he suffered a stroke that left him in a rare affliction called “locked-in syndrome.” He retained vision and hearing, and his mind continued to function perfectly, but his body was almost completely paralyzed. He could not move or speak. In the film a friend, visiting him in the hospital in Berck, a wind-swept seaside town in northern France, reports the latest gossip from the cafes of Paris: “Have you heard? Jean-Dominique is a vegetable.” “What kind of vegetable? ” Jean-Dominique wonders. “A carrot? A pickle? ” Like his condition, the metaphor is cruel, but not altogether unredeemable. As we come to understand in the course of this fierce and lovely film, his existence is not that of a vegetable but rather of a garden, a hothouse of consciousness, memory and ecstatic imagination.


2/3/08

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