Introduction | Sequence | Religion in Composition Classrooms | Sharing Others' Stories | Multiple Media | Multiple Cultures | Case Studies | Anonymous | Lauren Goldstein | Charissa Coleman Muhammad | Elizabeth Jones | Final Thoughts
One time my mother took me for a life reading
And the poem that she had recited to me
was one of Yogananda's poems--
his Prayer at Dawn.
With the opening of the earliest dawn and the lotus-buds,
my soul softly opens in prayer to receive Thy light.
It means that I have that connection,
that communication, with my teacher.
I never met him individually or in the body,
but I have felt always very close to him in the spirit.
Bathe each petal of my mind with Thy radiant rays!
I saturate myself with the perfume of Thy presence,
And I did my Kriya initiation,
and this signals the bond between the guru
and the disciple.
and I wait to waft with the breeze the aroma
of Thy message of love to all.
And I think it points out that communication is
not just through writing or the reading, but also through the spirit.
Bless me, that with the spreading dawn
I may spread Thy love everywhere.
His words spoke to me through his book and through the readings,
and also through the chants and prayers, which we practice every day.
Bless me, that with the awakening dawn
I may awaken all souls with my own
and bring them to Thee.
And I would like to repeat the words from "Polestar of My Life":
"I have made Thee
Polestar of my life.
Though my sea is dark
And my stars are gone,
Still I see the path
Through Thy mercy."
Reflect Several literate practices figure significantly in Anonymous’s (audio) vernacular religious literacy narrative. She speaks several times of experiencing spiritual guidance through reading; it was through the autobiography of her spiritual teacher (Paramahansa Yogananda) that she discovered his story and teachings, and at the end she expresses her hope that her relatives will likewise find their own spiritual paths based on the reading that inspires them. Reading aloud (poetry, chants, and prayers) also plays an important role in her daily spiritual practice, she notes, and she closes her narrative by reciting one of Yogananda’s poems. Her fundamental experience of communication is “on very many levels: not just through writing or the reading, but also through the spirit” [give time stamp], which provides the foundation for “the bond between guru and disciple” she experiences with Yogananda despite having never met him in person. In response to these practices, I wanted to explore a remediation of Anonymous’s literacy narrative as an alphabetic poem that used her words in conversation with those of her teacher (though via a different channel than her audio recording, based on the terms of the assignment).
I considered making an erasure poem with the transcript of her narrative—erasing all but a few key words in order to “unearth” a new poem—but I worried about the risks of decontextualizing her words and “writing” my own voice. Instead, I selected substantial phrases that traced the arc of her narrative from beginning to end and put them in a dialogic arrangement with the text of Yogananda’s “Prayer at Dawn,” one of the poems she mentioned in her narrative as significant to her spiritual literacies and growth. I aligned Anonymous’s text at the right and Yogananda’s poem at the left to signify that though she speaks first in this source narrative, her voice and thoughts respond to the historically earlier historical voice of her teacher. Her voice speaks first, though, because this is her story and interpretation of her teacher’s texts. At the end are the lines she used to close her narrative, “Polestar of My Life,” centered on the page in order to visually indicate the voices of teacher and student coming together as she recites his words—a representation of the many layers (reading, writing, and spirit) surrounding her literacy practices.
Respond