Some quotes and concepts

I read through my notes in the novel, and here are some quotes I liked at the time, and some general ideas/concepts:

------------------

Fugitive Pieces Quotes:

[Preface]

“During the Second World War, countless manuscripts – diaries, memoirs, eyewitness accounts – were lost or destroyed. Some of these narratives were deliberately hidden – buried in back gardens, tucked into walls and under floors – by those who did not live to retrieve them.

Other stories are concealed in memory, neither written nor spoken. Still others are recovered, by circumstance alone.

…Shortly before his death, Beer had begun to write his memoirs. “A man’s experience of war,” he once wrote, “never ends with war. A man’s work, like his life, is never completed.”

[[re-presentation of stories, hidden stories, importance of memory]]

p5 – ‘Time is a blind guide’

p22 – ‘slowly my tongue learned its sad new powers. I longed to cleanse my mouth of memory’

[[language]]

p25 – ‘when I woke, my anguish was specific: the possibility that it was as painful for them to be remembered as it was for me to remember them; that I was haunting my parents and Bella with my calling, startling them awake in their black beds.’

[[persistence of loss, memory]]

p53 – ‘we long for place; but place itself longs. Human memory is encoded in air currents and river sediment’

[[identity, immigration, memory, geology]]

p86 – ‘in xenetia – in exile,” said Athos on our last night with Daphne and Kostas in their garden, “in a foreign landscape, a man discovers the old songs. He calls out for water from his own well, for apples from his own orchard, for the Muscat grapes from his own vine’

[[immigration, memory, identity]]

p89 – ‘Like Athens, Toronto is an active port. It’s a city of derelict warehouses and docks, of waterfront silos and freight yards, coal yards and a sugar refinery… It’s a city where almost everyone has come from elsewhere – a market, a caravansary – bringing with them their different ways of dying and marrying, their kitchens and songs. A city of forsaken worlds; language a kind of farewell.

[[in fact, 89-90 is a very good section on Toronto and postcolonial identity, as well as geological memory/consciousness, could be good for discussion]]

P92 –‘Athos instructed me in the subtleties of English at the kitchen table on St. Clair avenue. The English language was food. I shoved it into my mouth, hungry for it. A gush of warmth spread through my body, but also panic, for with each mouthful the past was further silenced.’

[[language, identity]]

P95 – ‘Language. The numb tongue attaches itself, orphan, to any sound it can: it sticks, tongue to cold metal. Then, finally, many years later, tears painfully free.’

[[ditto]]

P102-3 – ‘these weekly explorations into the ravines were escapes to the ideal landscapes; lakes and primeveal forests so long gone they could never be taken away from us. / On these walks I could temporarily shrug off my strangeness because, the way Athos saw the world, every human was a newcomer.’

[[geology and its relation to identity, and immigration]]

P108-9 – ‘This was my first introduction to translating. And translating of one sort or another has supported me ever since. For this intuition, I will always be grateful to Kostas. “Reading a poem in translation,” wrote Bialek, “is like kissing a woman through a veil”; and reading Greek poems, with a mixture of katharevousa and the demotic, is like kissing / two women. Translation is a kind of transubstantiation; one poem becomes another. You can choose your philosophy of translation just as you choose how to live: the free adaptation that sacrifices detail to meaning, the strict crib that sacrifices meaning to exactitude. The poet moves from life to language, the translator moves from language to life; both, like the immigrant, try to identify the invisible, what’s between the lines, the mysterious implications.’

[[another good section – immigration – immigrative action of the poet/translator, crossing boundaries, defamiliarisation ???]]

P111 – ‘I listened to these dark shapes as if they were black spaces in music, a musician learning the silences of a piece. I felt this was my truth. That my life could not be stored in any language but only in silence; the moment I looked into the room and took in only what was visible, not vanished. The moment I failed to see Bella had disappeared.’

‘I thought of writing poems this way, in code, every letter askew, so that loss would wreck the language, become the language.

If one could isolate that space, that damaged chromosome in words, in an image, then perhaps one could restore order by naming. Otherwise history is only a tangle of wires.’

P119 – ‘he often applied the geologic to the human, analysing social change as he would a landscape; slow persuasion and catastrophe. Explosions, seizures, floods, glaciation. He constructed his own historical topography.’

[[geology, obviously]]

P126 – ‘Bella, who is nowhere to be found, is looking for me. How will she ever find me here, beside the strange woman? Speaking this language, eating strange food, wearing these clothes?’

[[loss as two-way process, the dead are present in memory, still living through mourning. The stasis of the remembered while the rememberer will always be changing, growing]]

--

---[I really like the section which in my edition is 127-128, in the music library, in which cultures, countries, people and history all link together in wordplay, communication and language… postmodern play and breaking of borders in speech:

P128 – ‘Ceylon! Abyssinia Samoa. Can’t Roumania; Tibet. Moscow!’]---

--

P132 – Alexandra – ‘in her mouth, English was dangerous and alive, edgy and hot’

P137 – ‘Maps of history have always been less honest. Terra cognita and terra incognita inhabit exactly the same coordinates of time and space. The closest we come to knowing the location of what’s unknown is when it melts through the map like a watermark, a stain transparent as a drop of rain. On the map of history, perhaps the water stain is memory’

P138 – ‘history is amoral: events occurred. But memory is moral; what we consciously remember is what our conscience remembers’

P193 – ‘there’s no absence, if there remains even the memory of absence. Memory dies unless it’s given a use. Or as Athos might have said: if one no longer has land but has the memory of land, then one can make a map.’