Melopoeia: Syncope, Interruption and Writing
Rebecca Luce-Kapler
Queen’s
University
 |
Hildegard
von Bingen, a nun who lived during the Middle
Ages, created haunting, rhythmic songs, written
in the language of her visions—Latin.
But this was not the Church’s Latin, of
the learned, of men in an ivory tower. Some
called it vulgate, an earthy and practical patter of common people. The
freedom of her words blended with the freedom
of her melodies in a liberating form of expression.
Hildegard wrote: “When I was 42 years
and seven months old, a burning light of tremendous
brightness coming from heaven poured into my
entire mind, like a flame that does not burn
but enkindles. |
It inflamed my entire heart and breast, like
the sun that warms an object with its rays.
All at once I was able to taste of the understanding
of books—the Psalter, the Evangelists
and the books of the Old and New Testaments”
(CD liner notes). That taste of understanding
was an embodied response to the esoteric texts
of spirituality. Her visions brought the words
“down to earth.”
|
 |
Laurie Finke,
in her examination of feminist theory through women’s
writing, describes how, during the Middle Ages, the
church constricted the female role in spiritual life
and religious work until women were effectively cloistered
in religious orders.
 |
Some
of those women responded
by claiming mystical experiences and by relaying
words inspired by God, which served to open
up space to speak within a patriarchal and misogynistic
society. While some of these mystics engaged
in extreme self-punishing measures—including
flagellation and starvation—they nevertheless
found a way to enter into the public discourse.
|
Finke explains that medieval Christianity construed men as spirit and
women as body and, since religion was the dominant
mode of expression in that society, this thinking
had considerable impact. Mysticism became a
way for women such as Margery Kempe and Hildegard
von Bingen to stretch those bounds and to turn the dominant discourse to their
own purposes, to bring the spiritual into the
body.
|
|
Drawing
from de Certeau’s description of “poaching,”
Finke writes: “The discourse of the female mystic
was constructed out of disciplines designed to regulate
the female body and it is, paradoxically, through
these disciplines that the mystic consolidated her
power” (1992: 78).
The
visions disrupted the official interpretation. The
women, using the very discourses that marginalized
them, interrupted that language by introducing new
rhythms—rhythms of the body—that were
difficult to contain and created different possibilities.
The
concept of interruption is an important one for we
cannot hope to provoke without first getting attention
and halting the commonplace and taken-for-granted
language, whether we are speaking of religion or curriculum
or other institutionalised practices. Sometimes powerful,
embodied visions are needed, sometimes a direct challenging
of the word as Leah does, and sometimes it is enough
to use syncope to halt the rhythm for a moment, suspend
time, pause for another breath. Where the rhythm
changes, we find the moment of interpretation as our
attention is drawn to what has previously been in
the background. We have the opportunity to consider
what is important.
Syncope
in a basement
bedroom
peony drapes
swallow
the last
yellow light
black loneliness
clots
her throat
remembering
gauze curtains
on a second
floor
and cold
moonlight
like silver
arrows
faint shivers
of starlight
sounding
her father’s
grain cough
as
he reads Time
the
house creak
at
first wind
her
sisters
restless
in their sleeping
coyotes
on distant hills
calling
home
(Luce-Kapler,
in press)
Poetry can
serve as interruption—it draws our attention
to rhythms and then reinterprets them. The breath
can stop when we least expect it, leaving us wondering
before coming to understand. In that moment of silence
and waiting, we may see differently, and sometimes
uncomfortably, as Wendy has found in introducing the
rhythms of The Snow Queen
to students.
Jane Hirshfield
says of poetry: “because it thinks by music
and image, by story and passion and voice, poetry
can do what other forms of thinking cannot: approximate
the actual flavor of life, in which subjective and
objective become one, in which conceptual mind and
the inexpressible presence of things become one”
(32). “In language, the
fleshy tongue speaks” (1998: 110).
When
I read the official interpretation of writing in the
curriculum, I fall into the logopoeia—or at least into the holy logic of logos that Leah describes. Writing, according to the official
curriculum, insists that students will
identify
the literary and informational forms suited to various
purposes and audiences… use forms appropriately
with an emphasis on supporting opinions or interpretations
with specific information; use a variety of organizational
techniques to present ideas and supporting details
logically . . . [and, I am told,] students use writing
to record information and ideas, to express themselves,
to communicate with others for various purposes, to
reflect and learn (Ontario, Secondary English Curriculum)
Where is
the acknowledgement that writing does not reflect
an already existing world, but that it creates a world
and ourselves; that writing is not just about skills
and certainly not about given realities? I search
in vain for the mention of poetry ….
I want
to interrupt this story—and it is a story about
writing: about writing for purposes beyond oneself
for the good of the country and the economy; about
writing accountably.
Several
weeks ago, when some of us decided to interrupt the
teacher candidate treadmill and offer writing over
lunch, an interesting thing happened. Students wandered
into the room hesitantly, shyly. After all, how does
one enter a room where usually they hear about what
to teach, how and when, a litany of practice for the
becoming professional? Some of them noted that they
had chosen to miss the workshop about coping with
teacher stress to come here.
We told
them we were not going to talk about teaching writing
although they might learn some things about that anyway.
We were simply creating a space, offering an interruption
to the rhythm of the Faculty day for them to sit and
write for themselves. As they chose a button from
my grandmother’s button jar and set it in front
of the special paper purchased in celebration of this
time, I watched their uneasiness at being here. “I
don’t write,” one young man told me. But
he had come. He must have expected something would
happen for him during this time.
As the button
became their prompt for timed flow writing, they settled
in for ten minutes and I watched their bodies soften
into the normally hard chairs. The air in the room
seemed slower, less intense. I could hear their breathing
deepen. For forty-five minutes, we wrote and created
poems and small vignettes. At the end, they had several
pages of text, even the one who said he did not write.
He volunteered to read a poem and then another did,
and another, until finally everyone read.
As anxious
students began to line up outside the door for the
next class, the atmosphere changed and it was time
to stop. “Thank you for coming,” we said.
“We hope you enjoyed this.”
“Aren’t
we meeting again?” they asked. Sheila and I
looked at one another. We had not thought beyond this
one opportunity. I thought of the courses I had to
prepare for, the teaching I needed to do in the next
week, the reviews, the writing . . . but these few
minutes had been a space of deep respite even for
me. Energy had flowed in that room and I felt revitalized.
“I
can be here next week,” I said. “Me too,”
Sheila agreed, letting out her breath.
“This
was the best break I have had since I came here,”
one student said as she left the room.
We had created
a syncope in our teacher education program, touched
on the more-ness that Wendy describes. We had stopped
the pace, taken away the instrumental language in
which we were drowning and spent a few moments thinking
differently. It seemed that in that short space of
time, many of us had had the opportunity to remember
what was important, to regroup, coming together in
meaningful practice that was about paying attention
to our existence in that place rather than just trying
to survive it. This is the story of writing that I
prefer.
Bruner tells
us: “The function of the story is to find an
intentional state that mitigates or at least makes
comprehensible a deviation from a canonical cultural
pattern” (1990: 49-50). I think that at one
time the story of schooling must have seemed new,
must have explained why we are now engaging in learning
this way rather than following our parents into the
field or the smithy or the kitchen.
But was
that story ever comprehensible? The story of why the
children were taken from their families and gathered
together with one adult who was, usually, a stranger.
As Madeleine Grumet explains, “The common school
movement and the feminization of teaching colluded
in support of a program of centralized education that
exploited the status and integrity of the family to
strip it of its authority and deliver the children
to the state” (1988: 39). Over time, this story
of schooling has become further burdened with threads
of the political, the economic and the cultural. Schooling
is the canon, and the canonical curriculum needs interruption
before there can be a fruitful story.
When I look
at the mandated writing curriculum, the text that
deems writing as important for communicating, learning
and reflecting, but does not acknowledge how those
processes occur, I am interested in the fact that
there is also no mention of authorship. Nor is it
easy to find out who authored the curriculum documents
themselves. Strangely, their conception seems shrouded
in secrecy. What does this say about writing?
The written
word becomes a record, becomes attributable, as Foucault
reminds us. We can find the one responsible and edit
her or him. Perhaps the lack of authorship of the
government curriculum speaks louder than I first thought.
Yet even
when words are connected to an author, we easily can
forget the rhythm of the writer’s heartbeat,
the exhalation of her breath, her embodiment in the
world that she takes to the page. Poems remind us
of bodily understanding through the line breaks and
silences, in poetry’s gustatory pleasure of
sound. The visions of the medieval mystics could only
be explained through the evocation of the body. About
her music Hildegard von Bingen said, “Underneath
all the texts, all the sacred psalms and canticles,
these watery varieties of sounds and silences, terrifying,
mysterious, whirling and sometimes gestating and gentle
must somehow be felt in the pulse, ebb, and flow of
the music that sings in me” (CD liner notes).
I am reminded again of Wendy’s sense of more-ness.
Susan Friedman
(1994) considered other ways women interrupt narrative
and claim public space. She noted
that women have resisted what Virginia Woolf called
“the tyranny of plot.” That is, they have
used the structure to write their own ideologies as
well as to challenge that structure to find forms
that best tell their stories, often reaching beyond
narrative to create a collaborative dialogue in their
work; for instance, engaging the visual with the narrative
or intertwining that narrative with lyric poetry.
| We
need to watch for opportunities of interruption
and create a syncope in the curriculum story.
We need to cast what Gary Morson calls “a
sideshadow.” Morson pointed out that within
texts as in life there are choices taken and
those passed over, yet even those unactualized
possibilities can leave their mark on history.
A present, therefore, can grow from an unrealized
past. These traces of paths taken and untaken
in a text, Morson called “sideshadowing.”
Sideshadowing restores the possibility of
possibility:
“to understand a moment is to grasp not
only what did happen but also what might have
happened” (1994: 118–119).
|
 |
The
story of curriculum is a site of contingency and possibility.
Within such a subjunctive space, one can realize the
complexity of experience while seeing the openings—the
syncopes—to call into question what we have
believed. We realize not only what we have fostered,
but what we could have offered or heard—what
other voices echo through the lines. The poetic breath
of the silence and syncope are possible in every moment,
offering spaces for us to think and talk about other
things.
Cutting
Glass
spills like tiny marbles
along
edges of glass
cities
and seascapes
the brilliance of energy
rolling over sharp
lines of fragility
like the tenuous pleasure
of early summer
the question in your eyes
that I answer only in dreams
during darkness when I forget
the high wire we dance on
intense
and shimmering
waves
of heat
from
prairie paving
some
July at noon
the way light ripples over
glass
slips into rooms by morning
becomes as familiar as your
skin
beneath a bigger sky
the humming of longing
(Luce-Kapler,
in press) |
 |
Resources
Alberta Language Arts Curriculum
Guides and Program of Studies, 2002.
Andersen, H. C. (1908). Stories
from Hans Andersen. [Illustr. Edmund Dulac.] London: Hodder & Stoughton.
Ashcroft, B., Griffiths, G., &
Tiffin, H. (1989). The empire writes back: Theory
and practice in post-colonial literatures. London:
Routledge.
Bruner, J. (1990). Acts of meaning.
Cambridge, MS: Harvard University Press
Donawa, W. (2002). That unlikely
green. Unpublished poem. Victoria, British Columbia.
Elias, J. (1999). The prayer cycle. [CD]. Sony.
Finke, L. A. (1992). Feminist
theory, women's writing. Ithaca and London: Cornell
University Press.
Findley, T. (1990). Inside memory:
Pages from a writer’s notebook. Toronto:
Harper Flamingo Canada.
Foucault, M. (1984). What is an
author? In P. Rabinow (Ed). The Foucault reader.
New York: Pantheon Books.
Friedman, S. (1994). Craving stories:
Narrative and lyric in contemporary theory and women’s
long poems. In L. Keller & C. Miller (Eds.), Feminist
measures: Soundings in poetry and theory. Ann Arbor,
MI: University of Michigan Press. 15–42.
Grumet, M. (1988). Bitter milk:
Women and teaching. Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press.
Havel,V. (1997). The art of the
impossible: Politics as morality in practice. Toronto: Knopf.
Hirshfield, J. (1998). Nine gates:
Entering the mind of poetry. New
York: Harper
Huebner, D., Hillis, V. (Ed.), &
Pinar, W. [Introd.]. (1999). The lure of the transcendent:
The collected essays of Dwayne. E. Huebner.
Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. [I have cited Dwayne
Huebner from course readings and discussions offered
during a doctoral seminar he taught at the University
of Victoria, summer, 1998. The 1999 date refers to
the subsequent publication of the course readings
by Lawrence Erlbaum.]
Lather, P. (1996). Troubling clarity:
The politics of accessible language. Harvard Educational
Revue, 60, 525–545.
Le Guin, U. (1979). The child and
the shadow. In U. Le Guin, The language of the
night. New York: Perigee. 59–71.
Luce-Kapler, R.
(in press). The gardens where she dreams. Ottawa,
ON: BorealisPress.
Morson, G. (1994).
Narrative and freedom: The shadows of time. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Nussbaum, M. (1990). Love’s
knowledge: Essays on philosophy and literature.
Oxford: Oxford.
Pinar, W. (2000). “Strange
fruit: race, sex, and an autobiography of alterity,”
in P. Trifonas (Ed.) Revolutionary pedagogies:
Cultural politics, instituting education, and the
discourse of theory.
New York: Routledge. 30-46.
Pinar, W. Reymolds, W., Slattery,
P., and Taubman, P. (1995). Understanding curriculum:
An introduction to the study of historical and contemporary
curriculum discourses. NewYork: Peter Lang.
Rich, A. (2002). Arts of the possible:
Essays and conversations. New
York: W. W. Norton.
Rich, A. (1991). An atlas of the
difficult world: Poems 1988-1991. New
York: W. W. Norton.
Schweikart, P. (1998). Reading ourselves:
Towards a feminist theory of reading. In R. C. Davis
& Schleiffer (Eds.), Contemporary literary
criticism: Literary and cultural studies. New York: Longman.197–219.
Sullivan, R. (2001). Labyrinth
of desire: Women, passion, and romantic obsession. Toronto: Harper Collins.
*Quotations from
Hildegard von Bingen appear on the CD Vision, produced by Tony McAnany for Angel records. (1994)
About the Author:
Rebecca Luce-Kapler, Ph.D.,
is an associate professor of Language and Literacy
at Queen’s University in Kingston. She is a
published poet whose research focuses on writing processes
and pedagogies. Her collection of poetry, The Gardens
Where She Dreams, will be published by
Borealis Press in March 2003. Her book, Writing
to Know Ourselves and the World, will
be published by Erlbaum in Summer 2003.
E-mail:
luce-kar@educ.queensu.ca
