So What

Here’s a drink for anyone dropping the needle on Miles. So What. I call it a coconut éclair. I pour in a boomerang of failure, sprinkle it with a trivial faux pas and add a pinch of destination. It excites the nerves and corkscrews the drudgery of pantomime. Here’s my bio: I’ve got three arms, five legs, twelve hundred prescriptions, thirteen faucets, a gruff exterior, a presumptuous magnetism, a small rebellion in my left eye, a keen sense of weightlessness and an array of exotic genitalia. My first name gave up on me and got a job with a suffix in Sussex who coughs up nearsighted reindeer whenever it ovulates. I enjoy writing letters to little towns in Florida. I like hopping around on a pogo stick when the weather gets fidgety and licking postage stamps whenever I’m feeling beige. Drink up, my friend. Tomorrow may be too late to mop our brows with regret. I see a cherub who sees what we already know, which is conveniently reversable, and upholstered with a foamy commiseration. I want you to feel tactical. Look east and you’ll see a surge of duration. Look west and you’ll see a garage dying in its own didacticism. Look north and you’ll see freakish display of eczema. Look south and you’ll see yours truly, fishing for goodwill in a pool of disavowal. This is a perplexing point for some, but for others a simple doxology of larks in a sultry Alabama quatrain.

Forbidden Things

Truth was for my parents primordial and spiritually dangerous. The Gnosis, like Eden and the Original Creation Itself, had once been perfect and complete – a simple sentence – “good” as Genesis testifies. But Gnosis, Eden and Creation, the very Word, had been lost in a Fall from Grace that we know as knowledge. The sentence, no longer simple, grows apprehensive of a duplicity. It covers what it is about to say. It rationalizes. It qualifies itself. Noah becomes drunk and bewildered from the fruit of that vine and threatens to say forbidden things.

-                 -       Robert Duncan, The Truth and Life of Myth

 

The spirits surrounding us are anomalies of the space-time continuum and are, consequently, highly insidious. They get into everything, especially my breath, and stream into being as words. They hunger for attention. They glide around everyone's nervous system causing garlic and flowers. I hear some of them now, buzzing around my head like French hotels. You'd think they'd have better things to do. They’re exhausting. I want to be rid of them. I want to be more like our cat, and sit and stare at nothing, at the air, at whatever subtleties ornament the invisible realms. Yet these fairies and flashes of lightning, while evoking a certain poetic feeling, also stir in me a desire to lead a new life, something more allegorical, more abstract and ethereal, and their contradictory nature makes that break easier for me.

Proust was fascinated by the names of places. They appealed strongly to his imagination. So that, when he encountered the actual, place he felt disappointment. The reality never matched the power of his imagination. And this is what language does. This is the fever of language. The mood sometimes goes against the season in which one is having fun, and is called an emotional dissonance. It sometimes spills out of the mouth, looking a little opaque, until it gets some traction, and finds its parallels in the local uncertainties. Intensities of pitch and tempo mount the walls of our prison and drop like bliss on the dry hot ground. Some few years ago, enchantments came easy. What happened? Deep in the caverns of the afterlife, Thoth weighs the hearts of the dead against the feather of truth. It wasn’t language that failed us. It was indifference. And all the dead predicates of a lost synecdoche.

A sentence dreams like a plum branch reaching for the green-sauce sky. It creates a fin like a magnificent cathedral. It combs itself with my bones. The arena of its schemes projects an almanac of fire. So we think of sperm as the fluid of propagation and the semantic nest as the divine warmth of meaning. We don’t have to shoulder all of it at once. We may inhabit a capital structure of Gideon chrome that supports a monumental sugar bear broom, and believe it to be a marvel of Gnostic syntax. Nowhere is it stated that a prayer is equivalent to a bucket of nitroglycerin. And yet it sometimes makes sense to mount a creditable foreground against the ominous grays of a dispassionate plot. A sudden explosion will awaken the mind to its investment in a Ferris wheel. Remember that scene in Rumble Fish when The Motorcycle Boy takes Cassandra to the fairgrounds? I don’t. Not really. My memory’s pretty vague. But somehow it’s important to me. Look. See this? This is a bulb without a corresponding narrative. It illumines the room. That’s it. Which makes it a simple sentence. Like a broken woman on a Ferris Wheel.

In the Yoruba religion of West Africa, priests and practitioners perform incantations alongside herbal remedies that are believed to catalyze healing, offer protection, alter situations, or influence the elements. Incantations invoking the palm frond solicit the rustle of its leaves as they’re animated by wind to obtain swift answers to problems. The rustle of its leaves is seen as the voice of ancestors and Orisha, the deity of iron and clearing paths. I see in Diane di Prima’s Rant a similar invocation of power, an appeal to the human imagination to resist the onslaughts of conformity and predatory aspects of industry and science, “a multidimensional chess which is divination and strategy: the war that matters is the war against the imagination / all other wars are subsumed in it.” We invoke the oversoul. The power of the void. Interconnection. Flux. The revolution of everyday life. The influence of the immaterial, which is the caress of stars, and the triumph of being.

We see the insanity of our time in the demons of profit. Commerce. Marketing. Branding. The savage gluttony of data centers imposed on rural communities with the brutal of authoritarianism of a barnyard gavage. College professors living in cars. Populations bombed with random indifference. Rampant inflation expressing the rot and corruption conspicuous in the feeding frenzies of the obscenely rich.

It’s a marvelous sight: the Olympic mountains at 2:00 in the afternoon on a warm day in mid-June. I love mountains. When I was kid in my grandfather’s study I used to stare at the Rockies with admiration and wonder. I grew up in Minnesota, where everything is flat, or a quiet undulation of hills. The mountains were full of drama. High dizzying rocks of granite and sparkly schist. My uncle had a cabin up there whose rain barrel held a dark cold water that froze my hand with its shocking cold when I plunged it in. It felt preternatural, like a charm, like the domain of a woodland spirit. I remember that afternoon in Boulder in the summer of 1995 when Allen Ginsberg, who’d been ill, felt well enough to give a talk and a tent went up on the Naropa canvas impromptu. R and I and her friend sat toward the back where David Bromige got divebombed repeatedly by a dragonfly. “They ARE dragons,” he exclaimed. It was sunny when Allen began delivering a fluid and fascinating talk which segued toward Blake’s notion of sweet science. Minutes later a sudden storm of thunder and lightning blew in and bashed against the nearby Rockies. I worried that a bolt of lightning was going to hit an electric cable powering the microphone Allen was using and turn him into a ball of St. Elmo’s fire. Didn’t happen, of course. When we returned to Seattle and picked up the mail I flipped through the latest New Yorker and found a cartoon of Allen Ginsberg holding a fountain pen skyward where it connected with a bolt of lightning.

Inspiration never comes easy. It can’t be forced. You can’t use a crowbar to pry it loose from the grip of the empirical, the drab dreary expectations of the 21^st century dystopia we’re all trapped in. The exhaustions of work and worry. That sense of enchantment poets rely on to do their work has been under siege for quite some time by a fetishized and heavily commodified omnipresence of electronic gadgetry dulling and smothering the inner life of the human spirit. It takes special strategies, all of it uniquely suited to the whims and vagaries of each individual. I generally find it in the work of other poets, or listening to a foreign language. We do what is forbidden: we expend our energy on things that do not lend themselves to branding and commodification. To that which lies well outside the purview of free market Wall Street psychosis. There’s release in that. The giddy intoxication of an impish idleness. The mutiny of doing what is unnecessary. Of what is disastrously unpragmatic. Of whatever needs the raw spontaneity of an unbridled articulation. And is eccentric as the contrary squeak of bedspring revolt. 

Because A Fire Was In My Head

Combustion is only a part of the story here. There was still to be read the old motto of the silver mine: darkness is the nest in which the egg of oblivion holds the pulse of a poem. Poets are miners. Their picks are words. They sweat like anybody else. And could use a shower. And a more stable income. The rustling of an unknown language issues from a shower curtain constellated with pink flamingos. By implications, by folds, we move towards a field of expansibility. If we manage to show intellectual flexibility, can the void surrounding us draw our conversation toward it? The circumstances splashing our shore require our leniency. We need a milieu for these symptoms of a disease we have yet to fully understand. And that milieu is language. The smell of its lumber is delicious. The banshee scream of the saw rips the air into words. Spirit levels. Planks of grammar. Beveled edges. Swirls of grain. We can hammer it with our voices and assemble a new perception of our predicament. The disease isn’t that complicated. Its contagion thrives on subordination. All it needs is a little insubordination. The disease will cure itself.

Everything constitutes a thesis. Cognition is a charming device, and is somewhat like an expedition into the unknown. You can evade a religion, but you can’t evade life. One day you may be fooled by a single hair sprouting out from an eyebrow and think it’s a sign of something eccentric, which, of course, is precisely the case. The Gravitron works by centrifugal force, flattening your body against the wall when the floor drops out. Eccentricity is slightly different. It requires a place like San Francisco, and a point in time like 1966. What happens when you bring together a group of kindred spirits, people who embrace life with joy and openness, the result is a centrifugal thrust of intellectual acuity and long conversations that spiral out into the California night. Crown molding high baseboards and cheap rent. Hold infinity on the palm of your hand. Dilations that elude the grip of the industrial war machine. Reflective ponds pondering the mystery of Being.

Annealing a language to make it less brittle and easier to shape is a good place to begin. You can change the narrative any time you want. You’re not going to get a lot of cooperation at first. You’re not going to be popular. There will be no stacks of your books at the airport gift shop sandwiched like a towering éclat of polished reliable prose between stacks of Kristin Hannah and Neil deGrasse Tyson. Nobody likes a sentence that isn’t entirely sure of where it’s going. Nobody likes a bumbling merry-andrew feeling around in the dark for a light switch, grabbing at your unmentionables and tripping over quatrains. Reading is a lost art. Which makes it especially dangerous. That’s why the powers that be like to hide it with best-sellers. You can feel the tension in the editing rooms. There are things you can’t say now. Things you can’t think. Not without consequences. Not without rebuke. Not without losing a tenured position, or losing an argument to ChatGPT.

Nothing at the gas station is ever satisfying. But the odors are intense, and the memories can overwhelm a so-so mood while the gasoline throbs through the hose. It always feels so cool going in. And the numbers add up with dizzying worries. Whatever is meant by fuzzy can gather into calico and clothe a demure desire to tango with a wild perspicacity. Therefore, let me bless this formaldehyde with a macabre burlesque and burn a hole in the fabric of our consciousness. Let a little light come in. Engage our bones with some ocean brine. I used to be against almost everything. Now I am against everything. In fact, I’m leaning on it. I use it for support. And contrast. I believe in contradiction. And the majesty of minimalism. I’m always on the alert for an escape route. And a map of the unknown. Which is a discrepancy so flagrantly lost in its latitudes, even the cormorants are confused.

Inconsistency is my very essence, claimed Boethius. The consistency of any inconsistency is a bellwether to the skies of March. Predictability is a cheap date but a cactus in bed. An unfettered language doesn’t predict; it coagulates. Behind each consonant, there is something like eyes staring back at us. Something wounded. Something coming alive in our imagination. It coheres according to a system different from the chilling ultramarine of a cold logic. Trees somewhere, glimpsed through a crack in the monotony of daily life, draw us into their world with their alluring outlines and eccentric incongruities. Anything we can derive from this quirk in consciousness is a blessing, a quick release from the domain of the sanctioned. The silver apples of the moon, the golden apples of the sun, as Yeats frames it. That’s what poets are for. They’ve got the keys to the door. 

The Golden Tempo Of The Dream Machine

 

My boots are moguls of leather I need someone to roll the window down I need fresh Wyoming air if your breath can sustain a string of words you can say almost anything and you’ll feel soothed you’ll waddle like a duck and quack hilarious epiphanies to the surrounding hills

I’m feeling talented today I’m just not sure what specific talent I have there’s a universe behind my eyes is it the same as the one in front of my eyes I can’t be sure but it’s worth looking into let’s start with the wobbly properties involved in the geometric deformation of objects polyhedral sonnets in continuous transformation mathematical entities blasts of sunlight crashing through the blinds to glimmer and dance among the many banjos hanging on the wall everybody knows the butter is melting a feeling that big needs a show Deak Harp live at the Blue Canoe in Tupelo if you’ve got to milk a riddle any old barn will do what old soul among these hungry ghosts could refuse to descend into the untranslatable musings of Rilke

It takes about five hundred catfish to push the river my left eye shrinks and distorts people I have a macular hole an immaculate ejaculate and the dishes are breaking due to a nascent personality unfamiliar with Dawn dish soap

Everything’s on thin ice these days this will rip it into summer everywhere I go I see helicopters tents on all the sidewalks I’ve got androids hemorrhoids earthquakes wars extremism autism fauvism quantum tunneling lunar swirls ball lightning the cry of Memnon missing NASA officials on my mind and a big cardboard box stuffed with letters from the 60s when people were still people and said things full of spirit and enthusiasm

I love illusions your breasts are sizzling with nipples galore and a map of China

Just below the surface of these words there’s a hawk urging you to jump into your life naked just below the dirt all the images talk among themselves the natural sphere of Ungeschirmtheit is the invisible and interior of consciousness what are poets for they’re the bees of the invisible pollinating our minds the world surrounding us is diverse and teeming with life certain phenomena can evolve in such a way the symmetries shimmer into variances of the initial state creating the grammar of phenomena in which physics is written and everything relational is what it is by relation with one another there are no absolute structures in the cosmos God is what consciousness is before it knows anything at all a pure ground that has not yet split into subject and object and that’s when paraphernalia helps Porsche apple wallet car keys the golden tempo of the dream machine Spirit Airlines Minnesota Lynx Dallas Wings Howlin’ Wolf’s Hohner C harp Spinoza’s microscopes temporary shifts in airflow

Our current dystopia is tumbling into YouTube nostalgia we’re all pioneers at heart from noon to Yuma it must mean something I wear spurs wide-brimmed hats quantum waves of barroom bandana discord attracts my fingers there’s a swimming pool in my eye here comes Calamity Jane smoking a cheroot I nod hello she completely ignores me I keep my thoughts to myself what am I doing here how did I get on this train I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something all I know for sure is that I’m smart enough to know that I’m dumb and the test of a good sarsaparilla is a quick earthy kick backed by an asymmetric bravado

If you see something luminous it’s probably a poem ten feet tall with 14 legs and a pair of jersey wings I like my coffee black you can think anything during sex and it will lead to a further engagement with the natural world convulsing within its own wreckage anyone can run a chainsaw but who can fly a washing machine over the Fairy Chimneys of Cappadocia whatever opens your door is perfectly fine be it a knob be it a button last night we saw Picasso in a boa there was something instinctive about it don’t ask me for the meaning of life the answer is shining on the blade of an agave what kind of language urges intimacy I don’t know but there’s a tuna in my pants I can feel its revelatory perturbances I like your lack of severity some situations are just like that they look supernatural when the lightning strikes but really my boots are moguls of leather just waiting for some new soles new laces flappy new tongues seven league strides and a can of Danner Boot Wax

 

The Eyes Have It: My Vitrectomy Adventure

Every transparent body, Novalis judges, is in a higher state and seems to possess a kind of consciousness. Like Iceland spar. Like the faithful fauna of definitions, or the anatomy of the human eye. Cornea, iris, pupil, lens, retina, and optic nerve. Is the iris of the eye a muscle or a fairyland of everything in the world? I think it’s the sparkle in your eyes. I think it’s blue. I think it’s green. I think it’s brown. I think it’s brown, green, and gold, which is called hazel, and is a domain of vision, a dead soldier, a stream in the woods, Arthur Rimbaud hiking to Paris. Though I don’t know why, in this scenario, I imagine Rimbaud’s eyes as hazel. Ernest Delahaye described Rimbaud’s eyes as pale blue irradiated with dark blue. Emily Dickinson described her eyes as like the sherry in the glass, that the guest leaves. That would be one mighty sip. Sadly, Dickinson suffered from a painful eye condition, most likely diagnosed as iritis, an inflammation of the eye causing severe light sensitivity, which left Emily with a restricted ability to read or write that lasted for eight months, which she described as eight months of Siberia.

I find that relatable, as my ophthalmologist discovered a macular hole in the retina of my left eye several weeks ago. I also have cataracts in both eyes. I see almost everything through a scribbly tangle of squiggly, transparent shapes called “floaters.” I thought these were the cataracts but they’re not, they’re collagen fibers clumping in the eyes vitreous humor, though I see little humor in it. Cataracts make things blurry. The macular hole distorts things. If I close my right eye and try to focus on someone’s face, their head shrinks and their features distort into monstrous, disproportionate, lopsided expressions, somewhat similar to Francis Bacon’s portraits. It’s kind of fun to do that. Of course, the person you’re talking to doesn’t know you’re doing that. It’s a domain of private fun. Like daydreaming when you’re supposed to be paying attention to something, a lecture or a poetry reading. I always considered myself fortunate to find a job that afforded me vast, endless opportunities for daydreaming. This is monotony’s gentler, more amiable side. So, if you ever see me in conversation tilting my head to the side and closing my right eye firmly shut consider your head shrunk.  

I went to see a retina specialist this morning - a young Asian woman I’ll call Dr. Yanjing. Before her visit, I went through several eye exams—similar to ones I had done before—identifying letters and focusing on a tiny blue dot. After each test, I returned to the waiting room where R immersed herself in a recent issue of Harper’s and a man sitting to my left watched videos on his smartphone with the sound barely audible. I brought Du monde entier, Poésies completes, by Blaise Cendrars, which made me feel adventurous and carefree. The waiting room grew increasingly crowded as several new patients arrived, two elderly Asian woman whose clothing was soaked with rain. When the time came for my meeting with Dr. Yanjing, R accompanied me. We sat in an exam room with complex eye examination machines. I thought the rather sterile décor of the room could use an uplift, and that this might be easily accomplished if one of the drab, off-white walls were painted with eyes, wall-to-wall eyes, blue eyes, brown eyes, black eyes, pink eyes, eyes upon eyes upon eyes. Eyes like jewels outshining the fire opals of Querétaro, Mexico, or the black opals of Lightning Ridge, Australia. Eyes with the soul-piercing intensity of Van Gogh’s uncanny blue eyes. The electrifying eyes of Gustave Courbet’s The Desperate Man. The music of ambiguity in Mona Lisa’s gently smiling eyes.

Dr. Yanjing arrived with two young women in tow, students, presumably. She got down to business right away, and delivered some good news: I might be able to cure the macular hole with eye drops and avoid surgery altogether. The eye drops – ketorolac and prednisolone – would have to be applied four times a day. Ok, I said, sounds like a wonderful solution. Let’s do it!

If, on the other hand, I return four weeks later with no improvement, then surgery becomes my next option. The surgery itself does not pose a big threat. It takes roughly 15 minutes, and is performed with the aid of very pleasant sedation allaying all fear and anxiety. The horror comes after, in the week following surgery. A temporary gas bubble is injected into the retinal membrane to serve as an internal bandage, pressing against the macula to encourage the hole to close. I would need to maintain a "face-down" position for a week to keep the gas bubble in the correct position. This would entail, more precisely, a week hunched over in a chair, my head resting on a face cradle while staring at the floor. Sounds like some bizarre feat of extreme asceticism that an aspiring holy man or woman must undergo before entering into a life of sacrifice and divinity.

It’s been eleven days since I started using eye drops with the intention of closing the macular hole in my left eye. So far, there has been no change. If I close my right eye and focus on the text I have just written with my left eye, I cannot distinguish a single word. All I can see is a blur with very distorted letters. I feel very discouraged.

The two types of eyedrops I’d been prescribed - prednisolone and ketorolac – come in squeezable plastic bottles like most eyedrops. The prednisolone - a topical corticosteroid - works by reducing any inflammation-induced edema around the hole and by dehydrating the retinal tissue, allows the edges of the macular hole to move closer together. The ketorolac - a nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug - helps heal macular holes by reducing retinal inflammation and edema, and by decreasing fluid accumulation around the macula allows the edges of the hole to flatten and move closer together. I take both four times a day. I tilt my head back, pull down on my lower eyelid, let a drop of prednisolone fall, wipe any excess dripping down my cheek with a napkin, apply pressure on my tear duct with my index finger and lean forward and tilt my head down for two minutes. I wait ten minutes, then apply the ketorolac in the same manner. The reason for applying pressure on the tear duct is to keep the medicine from tricking into my bloodstream. My biggest problem is in remembering to do it.

Tonight, as I kept my head down and my eyelid firmly closed, the light from a nearby lamp penetrated my eyelid and I could see what appeared to be a red, velvety fabric. This gave the interior of my head – the realm we call consciousness – the illusion of being infinitely huge. When I opened my eye again, I felt confused and disoriented. I got so immersed in that other world, the one behind my eyes, that I felt somewhat divided from the external world. This, of course, is an illusion. Consciousness is a diffuse phenomenon that in no way implements a palpable division between inner and outer. My neurons – which are the specialized cells of an evolutionary process that occurred in the physical dimension of the external world - are neuronally connected to the roots and rocks surrounding my architecture of bone and skin. Nevertheless, the illusion of fabric and tissue is quite compelling. It’s not always a fabric, sometimes it’s a textured wall, sometimes a pebbled floor. Sometimes there are edges and holes, rooms to explore, sophisticated cushions, translucent problems, karate prophets, polka dot operas.

I saw the ophthalmologist, Doctor Yanjing, yesterday. There has been no change to the macular hole. I suspected this to be the case when - day after day - I applied the eye drops four times per twenty-four hours. I kept testing my left eye on anything with words on it – Marcel Duchamp Nude Descending a Staircase, Tums assorted berries, sparkling flavored water, pocket dictionary, Shakespeare, The Bard’s Guide to Abuses and Affronts, Deak Harp “That’s Alright,” the trending searches on Google, Ted Rall GoComics, magic vs pistons, Hulk Hogan, the Lyrids meteor showers, song titles and lyrics on YouTube, she said so, she’s in love with me and I feel fine, Michael Jackson’s “This Is It,” Burger King Star Wars menu, organic molecules on Mars. Sometimes I could make out a letter or two, but most of it was far too blurry to read. Rituals like applying eyedrops four times a day do develop a certain charm after a while, a rhythm, a story, a structure, but when the underlying purpose of doing it expires, it feels desperate, an act of theatricality rather than a meaningful practice with a tangible goal. Having a surgical procedure in my future has the cachet of science, which – despite my lifetime contrariness against the rigidities of measurement and logic – inspires more confidence.

The face cradle with a massage pillow arrived today. I had to order it from Amazon. There are no stores in - or near - Seattle that carry medical supplies. All I could find on the internet were companies that offered rental plans, everything ordered by email or phone and delivered by truck. None of them offered a brick and mortar store we could visit. I found this deeply frustrating. I need to try something out before I pay for it. This is especially critical when it comes to medical equipment. Fortunately, after we struggled to figure out how to maneuver the contraption, my face fit comfortably within the welcoming confines of the massage pillow. R did much better at figuring things out than I did. Were it not for her, I’d still be on the couch, lifting it, exploring it, testing it, careful not to use too much force and break it. The instructions were abysmal, tiny, illegible fonts and grammatically curious sentences. The diagrams, too, were confusing and useless. R found a video for the product and a chipper young man happy with his gadget who demonstrated how things worked. It was also R’s idea to put the bottom framework under a cushion on the couch so that I could comfortably lean forward and let my head rest on the pillow, gazing down at the table and imagining how it might be to lose myself in a book for 45 minutes a session, with a 10-minute break. I did have to remove my reading glasses. R let me try one of her glasses which was quite smaller, but fit my head ok, and nestled comfortably within the hollow of the pillow where my face rested, cradled in a feeling of hammock-like coziness. She tells me we can find a pair of cheap reading glasses the same size. Hurray.

I was wheeled into the operating room on a warm, sunny morning on May 28, 2026. The operating room was—by contrast—white, bright, and chilly. A cool room prevents the surgical team from getting too hot or sweaty, which can compromise sterility. I felt quite calm, almost jovial. There were four people in all: the vitreoretinal surgeon (Dr. Yanjing), an anesthesiologist, a circulating nurse, and a surgical technologist. Everyone seemed to be in a very good mood, which put me at ease. There’d been a delay due to an unanticipated development with the patient ahead of me. The anesthesiologist – a man in his late 40s who shared the same birth date as me – was alert, curious, and genial: he asked if I was retired. I said yes, and I loved it, I found myself busier than I’d been when I was working – but it was difficult framing the sense in which I was retired since I was a writer, and writers never retire. Nor do they make enough money to maintain a sustainable income; unless a writer gets extremely lucky à la J.K. Rowling or Dan Brown or Stephen King, a freelance writer typically must find other ways to make money which, in my case, generally meant menial work in a warehouse or office. That’s what I was retired from: soul-sucking, brain-numbing, demeaning menial jobs. Now I could devote my time to writing, as I’d been longing to do for all the years I had to drive a mail van or install overhead lights or paint or garden or mop or deliver hospital supplies. He nodded in sympathetic agreement, and explained that he would be giving me propofol (I’m a fan) and valium (also a fan). I’d been given propofol for all my colonoscopies, and knew what to expect: I was gone in half a second. When I came to, I could feel people fiddling around in my eye socket but no pain whatever. The operation seemed to be over in less than ten minutes. I was rolled back into the pre-op holding area where I was permitted to put my shoes and cardigan back on.

R came to join me and a nurse appeared who went down the list of everything I wouldn’t be able to do: I wouldn’t be able to lift anything over ten pounds or sleep on my back or bend over with my head below my heart; I would have to spend the entire day with my head bowed, for which a face cradle is recommended (mine was already set up at home); nor would I be able to run. She recommended I take a 10-minute break for each 45 minutes I kept my head bowed. I could use the time to walk around and stretch or eat a meal. If breakfast or dinner were to exceed the ten minutes, she demonstrated how I could eat my keeping my head bowed and lifting spoonfuls and forked morsels of food to my mouth. When showering, I would need to keep water out of my eye and at night I would have to wear an eye shield consisting of a framed aluminum cup constellated with little holes.

I was also presented with another round of eyedrops: ofloxacin – an antibiotic – and prednisolone for ophthalmic suspension. Day one through day seven I would need to apply it four times for the first week, just the prednisolone three times for week two, two times for week three, and once for week four.

The vitreous humor in my left eye had been removed and replaced with a gas bubble. All I could see was a blur. The purpose of the bubble is to apply steady pressure to the retina and hold it in place and block fluid from seeping behind the retinal membrane while the tissue heals. I found it curiously entertaining when, preparing for bed, R helped put the basket-shaped, post-operative eye shield in place, securing it with strips of tape; sometimes the holes looked like a constellation of portholes in a spaceship which was also partially filled with water, and sometimes like a shower of meteors, or twinkly Christmas lights. It was trippy, and I liked it. There were several instances in which I could see what looked like spidery creatures on the other side of the portholes. Perhaps they were cataracts or blood veins, I don’t know, but I found them entrancing.

The seven days I lay crosswise on the bed with my head nestled in the face cradle were quite difficult. My back began to hurt almost immediately; I made a hillock of pillows to lie on which helped take some pressure off my back, and angled my head more comfortably in the cradle. I wasn’t able to use my noise-canceling Bose earphones since they didn’t fit comfortably with the cradle. This left me vulnerable to external noises, such as the rhythmic thud of an upstairs neighbor walking heavily on a hardwood floor or a neighbor’s dog barking or children squealing loudly in the park next door. I have a nasty affliction called tinnitus, a continuous ringing in the ears which is actually a phantom sound whose origin is in the brain rather than the auditory system, and which is often accompanied by a condition called hyperacusis, which is an acute sensitivity to sound. I do not do well with noise.

I used a Gymboss interval timer I sometimes use for structuring a run between running and walking - X minutes for running and X minutes for walking - to time my 45 minutes on and my ten minutes off in bowed head positioning, a practice which is sometimes called posturing, but frequently forgot to set it, or fell asleep and didn’t hear it go off. Such a structured approach turned out to be too rigid to be observed with anything like true accuracy. Sometimes I used the length of time I’d been listening to an audiobook or YouTube video to approximate my time spent prone on the bed. I was also stunned to find how quickly 15 minutes go by. It felt that as soon as I sat down on the couch to relax and have a brief conversation with R it was already vibrating and beeping frantically on the table, urging me back to my face cradle jail.  

I’d hoped to be able to watch some movies, but my right eye fatigued quickly. It was easiest to listen to audiobooks I was able to check out from our local library. I listened to Michael York read Brave New World with such clear diction and expressivity that the stark events and ideologies of Aldous Huxley’s dystopia were more easily digested. I hadn’t read that novel since age 15, in 1963, and I was as confused by some of the concepts as I had been at 15; for example, the people of the World State are described as being divorced from nature and biologically engineered to perform various functions; that I got. That the people are also encouraged to enjoy promiscuous sex seemed to contradict that. Back in my day, we called it free love, and despite its many defects and liabilities, such as gonorrhea and crabs to name several, I felt pretty close to nature whenever I got lucky. I know that Huxley was illustrating the damage promiscuity does to intimacy and love, but still: human sexuality is a very broad and complex arena and however mechanically porn movies represent it, the pleasures sex provides can be quite intense, and it will most definitely enhance one’s sense of animality and natural being.

Why sex ever became ‘dirty’ is a mystery. In ancient Greece they gave the name of erotic beauty to the goddess Aphrodite, who was also aligned with qualities of intense desire, deep passion, emotional complexity and the joyful indulgence of sensual pleasure. And originating in southwestern Nigeria in the Yoruba religion, the female deity Oshun is the divine patroness of fresh waters, love, beauty, creativity and music, pleasure and abundance. She is depicted as a charming, sensual young woman fond of honey and sunflowers, cinnamon and oranges and fried bean cakes, yams and sweet wines and vibrant marigolds, peacocks and quail and honeybees, music and singing and lithe, supple dances that evoked the serpentine movement of rivers. Huxley’s ideas of sex seem to be at odds with life’s more sybaritic pleasures, which are all intrinsically linked to nature.

My other confusion had to do with soma. I easily understand the dangers of such a calming and soporific drug and its huge propensity for addiction. The zombie-like passivity of the World State population seemed very similar to our own population of people damaged by social media and pixels and screens and electronic devices, clickbait videos and brain rot due to endless scrolling, not to mention easy access to drugs like fentanyl, which help ease the trauma of becoming homeless and a society whose complete loss of humanitarian values is as devastating as it is shocking, but the idea of pleasure being employed to enslave people seemed far less offensive than the protagonist John Savage – the one truly authentic human being in this Brave New World of propagandized fools -  flailing his back to the point of bleeding with a whip of twisted horsehair as a form of ascetic, spiritual penance and self-punishment. Later in the narrative his lashings become even more vigorous and severe as a means to purge his body of not just the contaminating soullessness and shallowness of civilization but more importantly his lingering desires for Lenina, a woman he loved and passionately desired but could not abide the openness of her sexuality. That just seemed sick to me. I mean, there are healthier ways to cope with inner conflicts like that. Running a marathon, for example, or rock climbing, for which the Japanese have a term: misogi. The current meaning of misogi – which originally referred to the practice of washing in cold water, often by standing under a freezing waterfall, has been expanded to include any challenging, personal test of resilience, and is said to be purifying.

There is also the challenging ritual of lying crosswise on a bed for a week with one’s face in a doughnut-shaped cushion listening to audiobooks and watching an endless array of YouTube videos. I don’t know how purifying it is, but it’s spartan as hell and austere as a monk’s cheerless cell.

The various cerebral knots and entertainments were what kept my mind alive during its week-long hibernation in a face cradle. When it ended, when I could get up in the morning and could walk about freely and could once again sit at my desk and practice French and read and sip coffee, I felt as if I’d risen from the dead. I also had an appointment with Dr. Yanjing: she showed me the tomography scan of my retina. The macular hole was gone. It would take about another four weeks for the gas bubble to totally dissipate and the few imperfections left to heal. On the way back to the elevator, I felt 50 pounds lighter. Reborn. Renewed. Regenerated.

I had, however, lost my superpower: I could no longer shrink heads or distort faces so grotesquely they resembled those grisly portraits by English painter Francis Bacon. Faces kept their just proportions, and although letters were still a bit distorted, I could see them becoming legible. I was returning to the world of clarity and light and legibility. Faces looked as they normally do: happy, forlorn, angry, perplexed, startled, pensive, speculative, scornful, wistful, joking, impertinent, apathetic, sympathetic, dreamily romantic, sexy, sultry, and openly, quintessentially, alluringly enigmatic. Translating life’s sometimes illegible spectacles requires more than a network of optical nerves. There is also the health of a third eye to consider, to purify and protect from the corrupting glitter of avarice, and the blinding disease of greed.

The Splendor Of Interrelation

What do you with a book that wants to be a world? How does one even begin to write such a book? It would be a book of infinite details, fragments, miniatures, dark circles, crazy oblongs, sad ruminant cows in Chilean rain, creaking floorboards, busy carpets, old sagging couches, abandoned Colorado silver mines, a surface of brilliant particulars. Shoreless undercurrents and tropical interiors. The invisible and interior sphere of consciousness in which everything has a ghostly conviction. Whoever, in this context, senses our destiny crumbling, will yearn for a sky of shimmering air in which to write themselves into being. Something, you don’t know what, is creeping toward the window in total silence. A formless presence craving texture and meaning. Wires and shapes. Fulfillment and blood.  Typhoons and arks. A book. Unfettered and curious and busy with life and death.

I saw the smallest insect I have ever seen walking in circles on my Patient's Guide: Preparing for Your Eye Surgery. It would be so easy to crush it with my index finger. But there was no reason to do so, and I have an aversion to killing things, particularly when the situation doesn't merit execution. It disappeared quite fast, and might’ve been an aphid, or a booklouse, which are found around old books, and are pale, prefer high humidity, and feed on microscopic mold, necromantic writing, and extravagant theories concerning the underworld. What if, I imagined, I did kill it, and what if the equilibrium of the universe teetered on this tiny little being? Size isn’t always proportionate to importance. A tiny aphid contains roughly 10 quintillion atoms. That’s a universe. Or at least a galaxy. Someone acutely perceptive might – as William Blake put it – “see a world in a grain of sand / And a heaven in a wild flower, / Hold infinity in the palm of your hand. / And eternity in an hour.” Science and poetry promote epistemes contrary to one another, but when their observations converge, the result can be startling.

The day my father told me that there is more empty space in a lead ingot than actual lead, it changed my perception of the universe forever. On an atomic scale, an ingot of lead is almost entirely empty space. And somewhere Kerouac writes that it is simply incredible that he does not fall through the ground on which he walks, so insubstantial is everything. Material is largely immaterial. The manifestation of the universe, of microbes and bathrobes and earlobes and jittery arachnophobes, of lobsters and crabs and oysters and unassuming coelacanths, of stars and planets and asteroids and nebulae and black holes and gas pumps and hydraulic lifts in greasy garages, gravitational waves and cracked mirrors in Siberian rest rooms, forests and castles and roulette wheels in Monaco, nations and dalmatians and squishy slugs and mushrooms, faucets and facets and the glitter of diamonds in a jewelry store display case, are all illusory. Reality is elsewhere.

Which is what words are: ingots of air. Concepts costumed in phonemes. The unreality of words is right at the surface. Words are inherently hallucinatory. “Sound exists only when it is going out of existence,” said Walter Ong. “It is not perishable but essentially evanescent, and it is sensed as evanescent.”

What are the implications of this? Implications are folds and it’s by unfolding them that their content overflows, and spirals into an unfettered plurality, which is where we find the splendor of interrelation.

Why I Continue To Write Poetry In An Age Of Aliteracy

I can’t answer that. It’s not a decision, not a decisive action. Not the product of a long contemplative journey. When you’ve been writing poetry for as long as I have it’s the result of an existential urgency, the action of a working autonomic homeostatic nervous system, a function essential as breathing. You could call it an addiction, but it goes deeper than that. It’s as intrinsic to my being as my lungs or pulse or fingers.

I am, at the same time, aware of the situation. And it’s deeply sad. More than sad. It’s terrifying.

I just watched a short video, hosted by a YouTube channel called A Homeward Journey, of a young woman venting in her car after doing a 12-hour shift in an operating room, presumably as an anesthesiologist or circulating nurse, and in order to afford her rent and food and household bills, had to continue work as a Door Dash driver. After 12 hours of highly stressful work in a hospital operating room. This is clearly not someone who might have time to read a book. And she is far from alone. A substantial portion of the U.S. population is now denied any leisure time to spend with a book, or visit an art museum, or go see a play. This young woman, as so many others her age, have been denied the things that give life meaning, depth, and joy. Hers is a slavish existence with few affordable pleasures sandwiched between shifts. A Cro Magnon living in what is now the Dordogne in France 30,000 years ago had, I am certain, a far better quality of life.

Unless you’re among the elites, unless you’re a multi-billionaire, life in the U.S. is barbaric, exhausting, and void of hope for a better future. And yet I continue worry about selling books and getting reviews. The situation is more than ironic, it’s shameful.

I have flirted with the idea of setting up a podcast, but only very superficially. Figuring out how to set up a podcast and blather away like a Joe Rogan or Theo Von, which is where the audience is, including myself for a brief time, until Rogan's romance with tech giants like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel gave me qualms about his direction, and I migrated to other channels, such as Sabby Sabs, Glenn Greenwald and The Duran, is a daunting and costly enterprise. 

I joked once with my brother that I was practicing a trade far better suited to the 19th century than the 21^st century. Which I hate. I’m not a happy camper here; the 21st century is big on tech, drunk with surveillance, smitten with unregulated AI and short on rigorous intellectual debate. I should be hanging out with the surrealists in 1920s Paris. Not to mention James Joyce and Samuel Beckett and Gertrude Stein. I stood, a few years ago, with longing and wistful pining by the gated entrance to 27 rue de Fleurus, Gertrude Stein’s Paris address, nodding to a young Parisian woman as she arrived home with some groceries, feeling a bit foolish, and hoping she might invite my wife and I in for a peek at the grounds, maybe the interior of the building, or the very apartment where Gertrude hosted dinners with Picasso and Hemmingway and Ezra Pound, who broke a chair. She didn’t, alas.

I do know a number of people who, like myself, read books and write novels and poetry. But they’re not an audience; they’re competitors. It is nice, occasionally, to socialize with other writers, but I never get the feeling they’re as devastated and angry by what has happened to the world in the last several decades, maybe because they keep it to themselves. Many of them teach, which gives them, perhaps, a slightly rosier perspective. Every time I think of Bill Gates gloating over the disappearance of print media 20 years ago I seethe with resentment like a conquered warrior. There are many bookstores whose stock has been so eviscerated I believe they make more money selling T-shirts and coffee mugs to the tourists.

There are numerous books and articles citing the benefits of reading as opposed to the benefits of accessing entertaining videos on the Internet, and the consequent loss of attention span and inner reflection that comes with reading. Life for many people has shrunk from a multi-dimensional universe to a thin, tinny Metaverse of electronic jabber and social media emojis. I don’t feel the need to argue for the resurrection of literature. Who would read it? Yet here I am. Writing. Venting in binary digits. I’m as trapped by this machinery as anyone else. I do, however, manage to lead something of a dual existence, one foot in the 21^st century, and another in the imaginary library of a 19^th century manor in Sussex.

My fear is that as things worsen – and the pattern has been one of worsening conditions, particularly after the plandemic of Covid and its atomizing, desolating effects on society – and as AI assumes greater influence, nothing will remotely resemble what was once a rich intellectual life. I would include even its sillier moments, such as the William Buckley’s Firing Line in 1968, when a drunk Jack Kerouac surmised that the Vietnam war was fought so the Vietnamese could get possession of American jeeps. Kerouac had become a serious alcoholic by then, and would only be alive for another year, but his appearance a few years earlier on the Steve Allen show in November, 1959, was magnificent. He read the final passage from On The Road, beautifully, in full-throated command of the language, leaning into it with a love of the words, a bit nervous, but poised, and cool, with Allen accompanying him on the piano. It’s that image that helped launch me into the world as a writer, and for several decades I would proudly identify myself as such. These days, in case anyone asks, I don’t mention it at all. I just say I’m retired. On rare occasions, when I’m in conversation with someone over 60, I will mention I’m a writer, and enjoy a few minutes talking, as I once did with frequency in the 60s and 70s, about books and poetry and art and psychedelia. The afterglow is wonderful, especially if it lasts longer than a week. I feel a little more dignified sitting down at my desk to write, rather than the living specter of a former age.

What I feared might happen to our society 30 years ago when computers entered mainstream culture, has happened. People aren’t as friendly as they once were. There are words – genocide, transgender, homelessness, surveillance, porn, Epstein, Covid, vaccines, pronouns, etc. – considered gauche to taboo. They can stop a conversation completely. People visibly stiffen. There is no chance, not the wispiest of possibilities, of enjoying a conversation of freely expressed ideas. I tend to be a very impulsive and spontaneous conversationalist, so I’ve had my share of faux pas. I’ve also lost some dear friends due to my feelings about Gaza.

I’m beginning to wonder if we still have a society. Electoral politics is a dead zone. Elections are rigged. Governments worldwide are steeped in corruption. It’s clear, when the billionaires gather at conferences like Davos, where the real power lies.

Every day I’m haunted by the final scenes of François Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451, when Oskar Werner, as former fireman and book burner Guy Montag, is led around the encampment of book lovers and introduced to people who have not only memorized their favorite books, but have become them, embody them. It feels disturbingly familiar, as if it’s already become my new home. It’s a place I feel comfortable, even though it’s imaginary, it gives me a raft of sorts, something to cling to in a hurricane of dystopic disorder. I’m sure I’d fit right in. Trouble is, my memory sucks. I’d have to choose a very thin book to memorize. Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents might be a good place to start. Or Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal. The Stranger, by Albert Camus. The Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka. Tender Buttons, by Gertrude Stein. Trout Fishing in America, by Richard Brautigan. Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley. Tarantula, by Bob Dylan.

Ah yes, Bob Dylan. Who won the Nobel prize for literature in 2016. And why not? Tarantula is my favorite album.