Caroline Shepard, Author

Opening Lines: Riff No.1,  May 2011
“To Pass Back Through The Heart”-PART I.

“Recordar: to remember, from the Latin re-cordis,
to pass back through the heart.”
Eduardo Galeano, The Book of Embraces, 1991
(translated from the Spanish by Cedric Belfrage with Mark Schafer)

This first posting, on a blog that is intended to draw inspiration from the opening line of a favourite book, will not be about an opening line at all. As an epigraph, this quote precedes even the title page. It stands alone, offering us a hint, an invitation to pause and look again, before entering The Book of Embraces. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eduardo_Galeano)

One aspect of this epigraph could not be reproduced here. This is the miniature pen and ink drawing the author has chosen to place above the quotation. Galeano’s drawings (he was first of all a political caricaturist in his native Uruguay), are an essential component in the short compositions that comprise the whole of the The Book of Embraces.  In the company of Galeano’s enigmatic illustrations, I have often found myself peering into these compositions, searching out the layers of possibility with the awe of a small child who believes in magic.

The illustration that accompanies this epigraph is Galeano’s whimsical rendering of a small, perfectly round train track, reminiscent of a child’s train set. Traveling around the track is a steam engine pulling its coal tender, and a passenger car. I showed the image to an interested friend the other day, and she responded with ‘what about the boat?’. Ah yes, the boat, a two masted schooner, sailing along the circular track in the opposite direction. Incongruous. Foreboding.  Just a joke?

The same image appears in a later passage entitled Forgetting. Here, however, the circular track is broken into pieces, fragmented. No journey will proceed.  For Galeano, this is the fragmentation of our collective memory, of our individual memory,  the willful amnesia he holds responsible for making us numb to our shared humanity, and to our fate.

“Why does one write” Galeano asks at one point, “if not to put one’s pieces together?”  And indeed, in The Book of Embraces, Galeano weaves his characteristic playfulness and humour into a collage of reflections on art, the origin of the world, our histories, our follies; the culture of terror; dreams; the human voice; celebrations of  love, friendship, courage, laughter. We travel with him as a guide, our sharp-eyed witness, constantly in motion, our provocateur, our advocate for a human recovery that eludes us.  And still we close the book with a sense of his embrace,  loving and hopeful.

(to be continued….this first post was too long, so it has become two.
Watch for Opening Lines #1, Part II of  “to pass back through the heart”
a journey by train through the heart of my own childhood landscape, the Canadian Prairies, where another collective memory, symbolized by collapsing wheat pool grain elevators, is sinking into oblivion).