By Giovanna Riccio 
She Who Lies Above
by Beatriz Hausner
Book*hug Press (2023)
Hypatia of Alexandria—the 4th-century philosopher, astronomer, mathematician, teacher, and alchemist aptly embodied her name meaning “highest” or “supreme.” In She Who Lies Above, poet, librarian and translator, Beatriz Hausner, transcribes Hypatia’s name into a cheeky title indicative of the erotic élan that characterizes Hausner’s poetry.
In the author’s Foreword, Hausner introduces the book’s narrator and her double—Bettina Ungaro–a poet, librarian and archivist she chances upon while browsing the shelves of “the great library.” Ungaro’s own Introduction to She Who Lies Above, gives details of a recent move to Trois-Rivières, Quebec, an echo of the Tigris, Euphrates and Nile—the three rivers of the great ancient civilizations of the Levant. While out walking, Ungaro unexpectedly spots a mysterious man who exerts a magnetic attraction and cryptically leads her to a place where she finds a cache of undiscovered correspondence between Hypatia and her fellow scholar, student, and lover, Synesius of Cyrene.
As the fictional author of She Who Lies Above, Ungaro lays out her method for translating the treasure-trove of ancient writings: “rather than perfecting my work in the target language (English), what I offer to the reader of She Who Lies Above are meditations on Synesius’s and Hypatia’s correspondence alongside translations, and various forms of my own writing. Alchemy is the focus throughout.” In a work teeming with allusion, where no choice is accidental, the name Hausner chooses for her alter ego is drawn from the mid-twentieth century fashion sensation, Simone Michele Bodin, a model turned designer. Renamed Bettina, and working—at one point in her stellar career—for the house of Ungaro, traces of this persona manifest in Ungaro’s passion for classifying her fashion accessories, but the true significance of the name, is the couturier’s talent for alchemically reinventing herself.
Hausner’s declared focus on alchemy celebrates transformation as the ultimate cosmic force. Blending the genres of poetry, fiction, meditation, and non-fiction, her collection breathes life into her multifaceted subject now embodied in the physical form a book. Commenting on written genres, Hausner notes that the boundaries between prose and poetry are fluid and reflect “that all boundaries are temporary, waiting for the alchemy to show that every boundary is possibility momentarily taken form.” Hausner’s alchemy is centred on transformation necessarily expressed in a physical form—both intellect and spirit require a material form to be truly alive. Thus, the insistence on actual books and their houses –the great (and small) libraries of the world where all of human culture is ordered into a democratic system making it accessible to all.
In keeping with the Neo-Platonist philosophy of her other alter ego, Hypatia, Hausner’s central images—alchemy and the library become One. Alchemy is society’s elemental process of cultural extraction; the transmutation of the cosmos of human experience and imagination transformed and given meaning via language to become knowledge, literature and art. Physically embodied as printed objects, they are “rolls that morph to books and back to rolls again in a matter of seconds,” all accessible in humanity’s Magnum Opus– the great libraries of all times and spaces.
She Who Lies above is divided into three sections, each introduced by correspondence and interpretation. In “Everyday Goddesses,” the debut poem in the first section—The Correspondence–Hypatia manifests as “her own creation,” artfully appearing to Ungaro through figures of the goddesses of ancient Egyptian sculpted by Virgina Tentindo. Since sculpture physically manifests the unity of art and alchemy, Ungaro comments, “Clay bronze and gold defined her body and gave me her voice.” The poem ends with Hypatia transfigured into the symbol of a human ouroboros symbolizing the infinite, alchemical cycle of death and rebirth.
The second part, The Beautiful Technique, is a poetic exploration of the stages of alchemy occurring coterminously with Ungaro’s personal journey. As she begins to collate and interpret the correspondence, she finds that the alchemical process of “finding” Hypatia is simultaneous with the spiritual alchemy of self-actualization, “The Work is made and unmade and made again by the hands of the Terrible-Worker-Within who ordered that Hypatia be found by me and I be found by Hypatia.” In the completion of this work of poetry, the union of Hausner, Ungaro and Hypatia is lyrically and actually realized.
Delving into the history of alchemy, we are introduced to the first known alchemist, a woman named Miriam, a.k.a. Mary the Jewess. She appears to Ungaro and gifts her a treatise titled Wondrous Dissolution—the alchemical technique required to, “open matter, sublimate matter, and ultimately purify matter.” Along with the physical application of transfiguring lesser metals to gold, the focus in the poems of the treatise is on spiritual alchemy demanding a knowledgeable, disciplined, courageous seeker to undergo the rigorous stages of “alchemic love.” The imagery in poems like, “Rubedo” reflect a passionate eros: “I lie above you/my back to your/front your chest/behind me as/ I straddle deep/ and forward, I/ who am masthead of your/ heat, touch and gird.
Liquid fires and the chemical and transformative forces of sulfur, salt and mercury produce the dissolution and reformation of the alchemical soul, body and intellect: “member is tongue enveloped / as I draw out the metallic /liquid curve the flow reverse-plunge /the molten matter, so mercury and/sulfur summed together may begin/ dissolving, absorbing, creating/ your body anew.
That Interactions of physical elements produce metaphysical transformation is evident in the final poem, “The Philosopher’s Stone” in which Synesius declares that, “the single most important difference between alchemic love and its replications, is that The Great Work is spiritual and physical,” for it, “will always give birth to a material child…unlike its parents, this chemical child is a full participant in the divine.”
Titled Liber—the Latin word with the double meaning of book, and freedom, the finale of Hausner’s book is a love song to the library. As “a single body,” the library is the embodiment of recorded human culture existing interdependently with human liberty. Library as metaphor is both personal and universal: Ungaro recounts a dream where a silent man’s “confusing inner silences” (whose voice he seeks) are like “the library we find ourselves in;” in other words, our inner lives are imminent books seeking Being through language; meaning takes form on the page, the totality of human voices are gathered in libraries. Equally important, books are voices speaking and illuminating our muddled, mute interiors.
Aside from the “idea” of the library, we meet important personalities from history: from the ancient Greek Callimachus to the 20th century library theorist, Ranganathan and his direct and humanitarian “Five Laws of Library Science.” For Hausner, librarians tasked with the important work of collating and classifying written production should comply with the poetic spirit of the first librarians whose minds, “wish to sing while, while they amassed the youthful collections.” Love poems that praise the founding and development of libraries, end with “nature’s terrible furies” that destroyed the libraries of the past. Hausner’s outraged wisdom is tangible in the poem, “Deaccesssing the Soul,” her assessment and warning about our own modern furies—the slow, willful undoing of our human sacred trust.
Quite the opposite is the case of modern libraries,
whose destruction began in earnest
thirty years ago, and continues
unabated, through large-scale discarding
effacing and censoring. To those who perpetuate
this crime, I say, beware,
for the large eye, is watching from the wall.
The eye sees
The eye is witness
Hausner’s final pieces are both warning and battle cry for the library–the body, heart and soul of humanity. Drawn from Hausner’s own experience of witnessing, “the ruination of the library” by Philistines disguised as librarians wielding technology as their instruments “to exterminate the beloved objects” through “the effacement of millions of books.” The death of libraries and their replacement with virtual books and “sites” is described using the language of genocide: “First they killed the books. Next, they killed the librarians. Seeing as there were no books, nor people left to treasure them, they killed the library.” Poems that follow are in Hypatia’s voice and provide strength for living in liminal spaces as change shakes our foundations. The alchemic promise of transformation in rebirth and regeneration act as an antidote to despair: “Dismemberment repeats itself in remembering.” What are our libraries if not the keepers of our collective re-membering?
In She Who Lies Above, Hausner has penned a densely packed work; at once airy and light, oracular and lucid, damning and promising. She ends with a timely injunction for each of us to be like Hypatia/Synesius who warn “that if it comes to be that there is no library of books, there is no knowledge, no transformations, there will be no bodies, nothing will live.” Conjure such a world then immerse yourself in the refined intellect, and historically driven surrealist beauty of this work—and take heed.
Giovanna Riccio is a prize-winning poet and teacher who thrives on scholarly pursuits. She was born in Calabria, Italy and immigrated to Canada as a child. A graduate of the University of Toronto, where she majored in philosophy, Giovanna is the author of Vittorio (LyricalmyricalPre