A Half-Life of Cardio-Pulmonary Function: Poems and Paintings (review)

In her essay "Wampum as Hypertext," Angela Haas notes that "wampum embodies memory, as it extends human memories of inherited knowledges via interconnected, nonlinear designs with associative message storage and retrieval methods."¹ In his third collection of poems and paintings, Eric Gansworth, an enrolled Onondaga who was raised on the Tuscarora Reservation, continues his longstanding interest in wampum as both a medium and message of Haudenosaunee intergenerational memory. Since his first book Nickel Eclipse: Iroquois Moon, Gansworth has turned to wampum as a guiding aesthetic for his mixed-genre explorations of Indigenous loss and continuance. In his preface to A Half-Life of Cardio-Pulmonary Function, Gansworth extends wampum, understood as "the beads used to create belts that held all of Haudenosaunee cultural ideas" (xvii), to inspire what he calls "Indigenous Binary Code," or "images borrowed from popular culture, medical texts, family members who were willing to be models, friends, traditional imagery, formal western representation, objects from my home, all in communication with one another, creating hybrid new narratives by illuminating old ones with different light sources" (xvii). The wampum strings in the book's cover painting, the striking use of purple ink on white pages, together with the purple-and-white palette of its paintings, announce Half-Life's task to communicate in multiple languages of memory, from the visual to the auditory, from the cellular to the cultural.

The paintings and poems comprising Half-Life emphasize a living relationship with memory. The book cover's triptych, entitled "Cross-Pollination: Imagination," underscores Gansworth's kinship with other Haudenosaunee artists such as Shelley Niro and Jolene Rickard, whose works also embrace the ongoing vitality of Haudenosaunee cosmology. The triptych interlinks the Three Sisters (corn, beans, and squash) and three of Gansworth's relatives. Together with its companion poem, "Cross PolliNation," which can be read horizontally or vertically, the cover painting provides a blueprint for how to approach Half-Life, which demands collaborative participation of its viewer-readers. The twelve interior paintings thus reference the poems but also recombine elements from the artist's crosspollinated iconography: Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon shares space with Grandmother Moon; corn husk dolls with the Beatles. The paintings compress rich, interconnected knowledge systems that bank on multiple associations: for example, frequent images of interlinked wampum figures evoke the ubiquitous powerlines of Niagara Falls as well as family and national narratives.

As its title suggests, the book also breathes and beats. The rhythms of the cardio-pulmonary system—the collaborative movement of heart and lungs—animate the book's movement in sections beginning with "Inspiration" and continuing to "Beat," "Pause," "Beat," and ending in "Expiration." Graphic images of EKGs and anatomical hearts and lungs circulate in several of the paintings, linking physiological and emotional metaphors, or what Gansworth calls the "mechanisms of our endurance" (xvii). Together, Half-Life's poems and paintings ask how we write stories of the heart—of relationships, family, culture, and nation—in the face of so much ongoing loss. Shaped by grief both immediate (the death of Gansworth's brother) and writ larger in mass culture (the murder of John Lennon; the fall of the Twin Towers), the poems and paintings in Half-Life remember without ever forgetting the fragility and tenuousness of memory. Like the alternating colors of wampum beads, speakers in the poems leave and return, are absent and present, breathe in and out.

The book's title and chapter headings alert us that the poems will follow a similar structural movement of moving inward and outward. The complicated wordplay of "half-life," in concert with "cardio-pulmonary function," promises more than a metaphor for the body undergoing change, of the amount of time it takes for decay, as many at half-life, or middle age, might feel. The title's charged fusion of physiological and emotional languages feeds the book's preoccupation with temporality and mortality, with the unsought...