Anything, except writing words on paper, can be a way to mediate in a multimedia manner a student’s thinking in regard towards a text, from drawing pictures to playing with toys. The use of toys to help write stories reminded me of my third grade teacher Ms. Nugent, who in 1969 had us write short stories with our favorite stuffed animal as the main character. At that point I only had one stuffed bear, all the other toys I had had were thrown away smelling of smoke, when my oldest sister set a chair on fire after smoking cigarettes with her friends at lunch. The curse of unsupervised teenagers. I remember the story had something to do with the bear going to the moon (remember the year) by stowing away on one of the Apollo missions. I suppose this is also an example of intertextuality since I was combining information I had brought to the text, constant moon coverage from Life magazine, with various adventure stories I had heard. or read: Sunday Nights watching The Wonderful World of Disney, The Hobbit, Grimm’s fairy tales, Comic books. This was similar to the way I am bringing this story/memory to bear in order to mediate my understanding of the texts we read for class. I tend to write about selected memories that somehow relate to what I have read: a transactional moment. I wonder how the memory is transformed in its reformulation as a tool to understand the present text as well as the way the partial absorption of the text into my story transforms the unfolding of the tale I tell. The infinite unfolding of Dante’s multifoliate rose (Being/God) at the end of the Paradisio also comes to mind here, since one can never divorce one’s life from creation of meaning.
* * *
The story trails beyond its end.
sotte voce echoes of echoes reshape
an ear many years and miles away.
Who speaks : who listens.
subtext 