Selfography of the elegiac intertext

By Liz Howard

Just like that. In memory: a map is what appears.
—Erin Mouré

Inches within the surface of our temples a mirrored structure of cells allows us to navigate our physical and inner worlds. This structure is the hippocampus, from the Greek, by way of Latin, for ‘sea-horse’ due to it’s shape. Perhaps this nomenclature is an etymological recollection of life’s genesis from water, or a case of anatomical Rorschach, cloud animals, nerve squalls.

The hippocampus allows us to form mental maps of our environment, it is also critical in forming and retrieving episodic memory, memory involving the self with an indelible time-space signature. In this way we locate self, form self, tied intimately to place and movement. How does environment shape a self? How does that self move through its terrains?

In reading The Others Raised in Me I have the impression of new territory being chartered via the materials of an extant map, Shakespeare’s sonnet 150. Betts is a generative marauder, bending, twisting and erasing this map into parts once marked “here there be monsters.”

How much of Betts is in this work? We know his fondness for Canada’s game led him to bend his own restraint and that he holds himself in the literary company of bp Nichol and Christian Bok. Here there is a sort of orientation.

I think of a film I once viewed, in a physiology class, of a rat inside a white cylindrical enclosure. A pattern of black stripes appears on one wall of the enclosure. The rat has electrodes implanted into its hippocampus, into the parahippocamplal area, to be exact. These electrodes register neural activity and make it audible as a series of statically pops. As the rat moves in the cylinder the pops sound only in relation to the rat’s orientation to the black stripes, the rat thus mapping itself in response to a focal point. Is it helpful for me to wonder whether a similar process can happen in poetry? Reading The Others Raisd in Me I wonder how is Betts mapping his way and what leaks out?

On September 1, 1953, Henry Gustav Molaison suffered the loss of both his hippocampi. As a result he remained unable to form any new episodic memories. In addition to this he lost memories of the several years before the surgery that cured his epilepsy. We all experience the tenuous nature of memory; its process and neural loci are so fragile and easily tampered with. Memory is the simulation of experiential simulacra, a map wholly inaccurate, a map of silk resting on temporal embers and self which makes its art of patchwork until in the end, or in disease, all dissolves. The page is then the site of an ephemeral archive, as fragile, even at its very conception as an elegy.

The Others that rise are the self and its metal shadow. (Betts 7)

This past December I watched a webcast from a laboratory in California of Henry’s brain being sliced for analysis. I peer into a metal shadow, the remains of a man, a stunted self, who experienced no movement, only the present. It feels to me like an important moment.

This is a new geography of abstracted codes, borderblurred, seemingly boundless, not Kansas anymore, this somewhere else entirely. Now we locate and chart self across networks of others charting, constructing, plundering. En vogue. I laugh at what you own, absorb it into myself until sated. No one owns anything. More and more others and things are me.

we are not

made of words

tho we is (27)

Language is the material of the map. I put you in an MRI and ask you to think of a memory and watch its little map light up between your ears. The brain is the map in Borges’s fable that Baudrillard references. So accurate as to cover an entire empire perfectly, a perfect simulation, a constant simulation. When I reach into my mind’s space for myself I often arrive at a recollection of being seven and staring into a puddle on Maple Street in Chapleau. If I saw my reflection there in a Lacanian mirror I can’t say but I do recall seeing spectral swirls and eddies of gasoline on the water’s surface. Somehow this is how I appear in my own construction.

A more recent memory emerges of the images posted above my roommate’s bed. She is a graduate student in astrophysics and these images are from the Hubble space telescope, images of distant stars and galaxies whose colour and form defy description but are similar to the puddle of water and gasoline. Coming home this past week I found pages from a scientific journal that her fan had blown down the stairs. These pages detailed the electromagnetic waves that a star pulses towards our knowing. These stars pulse and so do our cells into knowing and into memory.

Memory, the cosmological tempest our little sea-horses navigate into language.