Lorin, did I understand you correctly in an earlier post? weren’t you saying you read an implied cut after the second line in the English version—I don’t understand that. I don’t think I understand what you think the ATOM HEART MOTHER of the first line is. The original newspaper headline (“ATOM HEART MOTHER NAMED"-- about the woman with the nuclear pace-maker) created a subject as a person, and she then became a thing (an album, a bar), and then for me, a symbolic character in this poem while at the same time the whole thing is a situation.
Hi Eve,
I've speculated on the possibilities I found as I tried to find my way into this poem. The proposition was that if we applied Hoshinaga Fumio's particular template for association (based on the apparently well-known song and followed for 'squid peppermint') to Ami Tanaka's 'Atom Heart Mother', then we get an associative sequence something like this:
Atom - has a nucleus: Heart - is inside the body structure, is a kind of nucleus: Mother - has a womb, another kind of nucleus: prefab bathroom - is a womb-like space
'spurts blood' , then, breaks this string of association, doesn't belong in the set. I speculated whether this break could be one kind of cut,
kire. "I don’t think I understand what you think the ATOM HEART MOTHER of the first line is." - Eve
I think of 'Atom Heart Mother' of L1, as given in the English version, as
mainly the title of the Pink Floyd album plus any association that brings, but along the way I found that the three words of L1 plus 'prefab bathroom/
unitto basu' followed Hoshinaga Fumio's associative pattern (atom: heart: mother: unit bathroom: - see earlier post) which he tells us is traditional. So I speculated that these four things could be an associative sequence/set
as well as being the album title. L1 isn't rendered in all caps (ATOM HEART MOTHER) in the poem, so L1 is distinguished from the album title, whilst of course alluding to it.
Atom Heart Mother
in the prefab bathroom
spurts blood
Unless we are to take 'Atom Heart Mother'
primarily as three proper nouns (and the cap at the beginning of each certainly allows for this possibility), the names of one person, place or thing (eg. 'George Walker Bush') which I feel is unlikely, there is a difficulty with verb agreement which wouldn't be there if L1 was clearly
only the album title (
ATOM HEART MOTHER) or the allusion to it (
Atom Heart Mother) So, one of my earlier questions was, 'What is it that spurts blood?' 'What is the subject of the verb?'
All of my speculations only apply to the poem in English, of course, as given. We have to read it as given. For all I know, David might've had to choose between the above and the more passive:
Atom Heart Mother
in the prefab bathroom
spurts of blood
Then there would be no obvious cut/
kire (apart from the kind of cut/
kire after the associative set that I speculated on), since 'Atom Heart Mother' is/are in the bathroom, but so are 'spurts of blood' The middle line then would work something like 'the doors of Kannon', opening to both L1 and L3.
But this would lose the personified 'Atom Heart Mother' that you mention and that's an interesting line of speculation in itself, another sequence or set:
1. the woman, unnamed in the headline
2. the ATOM HEART MOTHER of the headline
3. ATOM HEART MOTHER, the album title, divorced from the context of the headline & woman
4. Atom Heart Mother, a named person/ persona, who, in the poem, spurts blood.
Then there is a kind of return. We have, not the original woman, but an entity with the name, Atom Heart Mother, who 'spurts blood'. This is a kind of 'reincarnation' of the woman who underwent a two-step 'disappearing' process via the headline and the album title. Perhaps this
is the way this haiku should be primarily read, after all? Though I thought it unlikely, earlier, I can see now that it's a valid one, and the one that makes the most grammatical sense of the poem as it's rendered in English, as well as bringing in the element of animism which is at the foundations of Japanese culture. (Shinto)
- Lorin
