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.

 

My Battered Id

My battered id accompanies me wherever I go, sobbing uncontrollably as we plough through our day, denying our impulses for the greater good of society. And although I’m quite fond of reservoirs, I like to keep a sense of universality handy in case my individuality becomes an issue. It’s what we all agree on, isn’t it? The fragrance of panic. The modesty of denial. Lavender is a faith that serves as a thurible for mathematical exercises or for making wishes. Mathematics becomes a faith for those who dwell within it. There is, in all things, a quadratic equation running on merlot. One might sometimes perceive a molecular imbroglio. The atmosphere inside a parallelogram is grasping and muddy. Once, I had faith in mulberries. Now, all I think about are dirigibles. It sometimes happens that, moving through you with unlaced shoes, you feel yourself in opposition to the very essence of the wind. Why am I doing this? Who knows. Questions always sound so baritone, as if the universe were an opera, and a wheel on our grocery cart was broken. They say things happen for a reason. But sometimes they merely happen, and it’s up to us to provide a narrative, a framework with which to impose a law, and a panacea.

My body is not a hero. It has its flaws, its surprises, its limitations, its needs. There have been many instances in which it has been the source of considerable embarrassment. And while many of its shortcomings are exponentially exaggerated in old age, there have been instances in my youth, in those glorious new years of adulthood, that it encumbered my success as a human being with its ludicrous clamor. Like that final exam in linguistics when my digestive system filled the silent classroom with what can only be described as a primordial gurgling, an orchestral malaise that was as far removed from Noam Chomsky’s Universal Grammar as a two-carat diamond from a gas station hot dog. It has often seemed as if we lead two separate existences. And while, on the one hand, my body has been the source of numerous compensating pleasures, its continuous decline has, of late, been a sobering disclosure of life’s calamitous frailties, and engrossed the aloofness and vanities of the mind with the theatricality of its burdens.

It’s not easy to get enough leverage out of words to lift something unwieldy into place. Mortality, for example. Nobody wants to hear about mortality. The right hardware is needed, and enough subjectivity to withstand a molecular storm of semantic instability. If, in a glimpse of birth, sunlight shines forth from the ink, then that something shall be veins, and those veins will be full of blood, circulating like an expressway. We will see mortality as it churns with attitude. Anyone is never just anyone. Anonymity is a get out of jail free card. There are many here among us who have made peace with their chicanery. Something somewhere is always there ahead of us shaping its perceptions into such conceptual disport that it becomes edifying. What is it to walk through life free of all judgment? It is to dive into a pool to save a friend lying on the bottom. It is to shoot a film in Kodak Ektachrome. Or elude the bite of time with a song and a glass of wine at the end of a Sausalito dock. It’s a particular kind of ability, like churning out a manifesto in a single morning. I’ve seen it happen. I’ve seen it high in the air in a book evincing free will. He who moves to the back of his life as he arrives at the station breathless and frantic to tell about it, is blessed with deputation. It takes a great passion for this kind of thing, and a special kind of indolence to truly appreciate its grandeur. Idleness must always precede work if the concoction is to transcend all idiom and become a truly delicious fetish.

Description is always tricky. It requires an understanding that carves out a space for itself amidst a clamor of words. Otherwise, it sinks like a dead monk in a Danish peat bog. I get religious around electricity. I suggest you step back. Way back. All the way to prehistoric Omsk. What I’m about to describe here may not actually be breathing. Not because it’s dead, but because it’s indescribable. A fat old man stands by the window drinking sack. It’s snowing, and men are going to war. Scenes such as this never end happily. But they do entail a good deal of convolution. The path to narrative dereliction is paved with knickknacks. Therefore, before pulling the trigger, stir the poplars with a few indecisions. Look carefully at your shoes. Are they laced to your satisfaction? Have your nerves been fed tornados of dowager and garlic? Have you seen the orchids of Borneo, or the beautiful cloth napkins of Singapore? Enthusiasm grows into ultimatums if you don’t mellow it with a little equilibrium. Either you find what you're looking for in a language, or you secrete your life out on the periphery, surrounded by candles and facts. 

 

 

On The Outskirts Of Pahrump

This is for anyone puzzled by mirrors, anyone hanging around a glass engine in a pataphysical garage, anyone in a library curled up in a corner where a powerful inner light propels a dazzling exploration of the printed word. Anyone who has felt like a stranger in a strange world, or eaten oysters or slept all day. Picked apples. Bonded with an octopus. Wandered through a busy restaurant kitchen—lost and confused—frantically searching for a bathroom. Or a place to hide from the truth. But don’t get wayward. To embellish upon what is already there is to boil the broccoli too hard. What you want are eyebrows that offer maximum possibilities. A thick long beard and a rubbery disposition. Sometimes, you’ve got to throw life a bone, just in case it takes a cinematic turn. There are tools for repairing fate. You might call fate the engine of the plot, moving everything forward. Some might say closer to the edge. Others might say further from the past. Faraway or near the thunder, you're the reason bones need cartilage. Flexibility is a gift. Trees survive the storm because they can bend. And funeral pyres make really good page turners.

I owe our trembling to that taste you get when you've been left behind. If a feeling erupts, I could be anybody. Over there, on the other side of grumbling, everything is in abundance. It’s just the way things are around here. Heavy, raw, and overflowing. Pool improvements are evident through ingots of light. The sign keeps flashing, but the letters are dim and glow with a sad acknowledgement of mystical absorption. The noumenal comes for its visit each night. You can hear the gerunds sucking and scratching for sustenance. Swimming climbing croaking criticizing pursuing clucking clutching moonshining eating sleeping laughing crying and fucking around. As you can see, a sensual neck possesses many contours. But that’s just Rita Hayworth, sticking her head out of the tent. She’s starring in a movie I’m filming this very instant. If you look hard enough, you can see a camera whispering its attention to the forest. The house of language is alive tonight with the sounds of the Chantels. It’s all about maybe. Peut-être. Quizás. Vielleicht. Malia paha. Maybe grammar is the architecture of a grand silhouette. Something reflected from the other side through the gauze of an imaginary geography. Perhaps someone who has it can do this if they have it to do it with. And then go off and order a drink at the bar across the street. The one with the dim blue light and the letters in the window glowing hot mama red.

This time last year I fished a 92-year-old man out of the blackberries on a steep incline, reassembled his power chair and pushed him home. This year I await eye surgery. A week of piety with my head bowed to allow a gas bubble to mend a macular hole. We’re all experiencing it. This sense of something impending. Of course, something is always impending. It’s written into our DNA. The dread of something catastrophic. The premonition of Mammon laughing grotesquely and loudly at a banquet of fools in a moment of triumph. The emergence of something primal and corybantic that encapsulates everything monstrous about this moment in history. Godzilla rises from the depths of Eliott Bay, lifts a cruise ship from Pier 91 and bites into it like a Baby Ruth candy bar as vacationers in thongs and loud Hawaiian shirts plummet to their deaths in the harsh cold waters of Puget Sound. The image is gauche, absurdly violent, and for that I apologize.  Comparisons are always a little silly. If I compare my nail clippers to a pair of scissors the fusion of the two is a pair of calipers figure-skating in a Tweety Bird cartoon. Is this what a 60-year immersion in Keats has led me to? O for a beaker full of the warm South, full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene, with beaded bubbles winking at the brim, and purple-stained mouth; that I might drink, and leave the world unseen, and with thee fade away into the forest dim. We shall discourse, and drink, and walking beyond these words, lie down among some ferns, and dream.  

We can relax now, and watch the mime try to escape from an invisible subjectivity. I can accept the presence of mosquitos if they sparkle like possibility. That’s my thermostat on the wall. It's time someone saw what my next move is about. Imagery is crucial to the exemption of squash. I laugh at the endless highway of remorse. I’ve got Nevada sage in my headlights and asphalt for a muse. We’re on our way, boy. Uncle Sam had a good run. Established some principles, made some good movies, then burned the whole thing down. It’s left me feeling estranged, abstract and intuitive. I have a nerve showing what a little propulsion can do. The lights of Pahrump are coming up. The marvelous never yields to analysis. It goes beyond summary to present a somber knot of abiogenesis. The interrelationships we find in-late-stage capitalism are all the more exquisite for their enduring obsolescence, and their persistent indeterminacy. Each disavowal. Every little cautionary tale. These lopsided confessions. These boots. These reflections. Those stars above the hills. That beautiful flashing neon vacancy sign on the outskirts of Pahrump.

  

Borderline Poetry

Borderline poetry demands a leap. Said Deguy. Sweeter still, he added, is the vantage point of the mind from which one’s wandering is beheld. Amen to that. And what is a borderline poem? I see it as a form too loose and scruffy to be recognizable as a poem, just hints here and there that it means something other than where to invest your time and attention. Something discursive, but quick as a fox. Something fractured but monumentally seminal. A mongrel chlorophyl. A savage inclination. A disconnected milieu. A pilgrimage. An amorphous, embryonic prophecy incubating in the backroom of a louche grammar. Or perhaps something else altogether. Something awkward and raw but with a peculiar elegance bouncing up and down in a kind of prologue. Something with a clear chuckle of dexterity. Fingers busy on piston valves. The pleasures of a threshold. The annoyances of dirty dishes. The pitfalls of miniature golf. The quiet in a music studio seconds before the first note. A pregnant pause. A mind with 300 claws. The birth of a fresh new gestalt. An eye in a bucket of shivered perception, looking from side to side.

Borderline poetry is rude and unschooled. Dim, unnecessarily divergent, and marginal as a lunar commissary for lunatic extraterrestrials. It doesn’t require a license. Poetic license is an encumbering oxymoron. It’s an ox and it’s for morons. The freedom to do anything is paralyzing. You need constraints. Constraints are liberating. Like music. The first time I got in a poem I was listening to Ike and Tina Turner in a beach house near Three Tree Point near Burien, Washington. I just graduated from high school and the future had never felt so huge. So daunting. So dispiriting. So astounding. The music at that moment in time was phenomenal. And most of the people playing it looked like romantics from England’s Regency period. It made quite a good soundtrack for the aberrations of an impulsive youth with subversive tendencies. I’ve been trying to recapture that moment ever since. But it requires brisk salt air, the giddiness of youth, and an inferno to dip your quill in. Ike and Tina Turner were just the tip of the iceberg. It was when I discovered Charles Baudelaire that the door to another dimension opened.

Les fleurs du mal was the first borderline poetry I discovered. It was irreverent and sensual and contrary to the conventional morality of its time, which was recognizably obsessed with wealth and power and industry - just as in the U.S. of the mid-60s and Vietnam - and managing a conformable and passive public. Baudelaire had the heart of a warrior. He was not conformable. Baudelaire was marginalized and scandalized just as any other rebellious spirit, Shelley in England and Hölderlin in Germany. The most rebellious and romantic of the U.S. poets emerged in the 40s and were highly prominent and influential in the 60s, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Burroughs, Diane di Prima, Amiri Baraka and Michael McClure. There were also Anne Waldman who – with Allen Ginsberg, founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado - Ted Joans, Joanne Kyger and Philip Lamantia, who was close in spirit and style to the French surrealists, and whose omnivorous appetite for the exotic and otherworldly found sustenance in Native American spirituality and Catholicism, and whose poetry rumbled and hissed with the ores of the marvelous. Gary Snyder, who was an odd hybrid between a Zen priest and a frontiersman, remains to this day, at age 96, a wise ambassador of ecopoetics. Gregory Corso was perhaps the most determinedly averse to the suffocating routines and compromises of institutionalized careerism. He lived well outside the walls of polite society, pursuing the life of a vagabond and often relying on the support of other writers and admirers to survive.

I found Gregory Corso’s stance the most appealing; he did more than write poetry, he lived it. His life was poetic. His bearing in the world was the stuff of romance and poetry. Institutions such as universities compel a certain conformity to certain standards, in exchange for which many advantages are conferred, such as a salary, which secures stability, and status. This, however, also compels one to live in a cage whose bars are invisible but whose proscriptions are real. Even those with tenure can find themselves without a job if they openly express political concerns contrary to the stated positions of the university in whose employ they enjoy their privileges. Maura Finkelstein at Muhlenberg College – a liberal arts college in Allentown, Pennsylvania – became one of the first tenured professors dismissed after posting content on social media critical of Zionism. Sang Hea Kil, a tenured professor at San José State University, is reported as the first tenured faculty member fired from a US public university in connection to pro-Palestinian campus protests. And in the novel Stoner by John Williams, the protagonist – William Stoner, a stoical and highly motivated teacher passionate about literature - is punished in subtle but damaging ways because he refuses to pass an incompetent student. While a work of fiction, I don’t for a minute believe these things don’t happen with alarming frequency.

Merriam-Webster defines ‘borderline’ as a: being in an intermediate position or state; not fully classifiable as one thing or its opposite, i.e. a borderline state between waking and sleeping, or b: not quite up to, typical of, or as severe as what is usual, standard, or expected, i.e. borderline intelligence, borderline hypertension, or c: characterized by psychological instability in several areas (such as interpersonal relations, behavior, and identity) but only with brief or no psychotic episodes.

I’m drawn to intermediate states. Gray zones. Crepuscular fugues. Calamity and prologue. The mystical and the physical. Bardo – the liminal state in Buddhism between death and rebirth. Barzakh in Islaam, the phase between a person’s death and their resurrection. The mesophase in physics in which matter is intermediate between a solid and a liquid, such as block copolymers, materials that can self-assemble into complex mesophases like lamellar (plates, scales, layers that are flat and thin) or hexagonal structures. Archaeopteryx, a raven-sized carnivore featuring a blend of reptilian, dinosaurian, and bird-like traits, such as feathered wings paired with teeth, claws, and a long bony tail, represents an intermediate state between dinosaurs and birds.

My favorite intermediate states are related to human consciousness: hypnopompia and hypnogogia. Hypnopompia is the state of consciousness between sleeping and coming awake and is characterized by a dreamy euphoria in which hallucinatory phenomena freely associate with very little, if any, intervening rationale. Hypnogogia is the same, but occurs as one falls asleep. I frequently enjoy hypnopompic states – it’s a fabulous way to emerge into the world – and have no memory of ever enjoying the same state as I fall asleep. I just fall asleep, quite often with BBC 4 Extra in the background, The Goon Show or Desert Island Discs Revisited.

Reading frequently constitutes an intermediate state between being alert and fully attentive and being elsewhere, floaty, delicate, dreamy and abstract. The effect is exponentiated if I happen to be reading poetry. And if the poetry happens to be borderline poetry, I sublimate into a quivering ethereality of accumulated cumulus and towering, stratospheric speculations, often with negatively charged particles creating a massive electric field that discharges as lightning.

Emily Dickinson’s poetry is in many ways borderline. Each poem reads like a lightning-fast, epiphanic burst of insight, each word quivering like a blob of mercury on a flat surface.

Rimbaud’s Illuminations are emphatically borderline. They exist somewhere between chasms of azure and wells of fire.  He alone has keys to this savage side show.

Ed Dorn’s Gunslinger: borderline. The gunslinger shoots metaphysical bullets.

Bob Kaufman’s Blue O’Clock: seven shaking angels revealing our pain.

Borderline poetry is difficult to market. People like to know what it is they’re investing in. They want assurances. Nobody likes feeling insecure. This is especially true of award panels. This insures that anything borderline remains in the wilderness.

We live in a world of taxonomies. Definitions. Categories. Divisions. Ranks. Class. Grade. Grouping. But it’s a false world. It’s a world based on counterfeit assumptions. Authenticity scares the shit out of the rich. It gives them a thrill. Just watch their eyes as they sit at Christie’s and Sotheby’s. I like Oscar Wilde’s brilliant phrase: they know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

The borderline poem, situated at the threshold between a solid, unidimensional signification and a volatile polysemy, resists absorption and materializes a boisterous autonomy. The subjective element is nevertheless maintained as a potential liposuction. Something must be left for the consumer. The greater the effort to participate in the realization of the work and its structural dynamic, the greater the need to lubricate its gears with greasy contingencies. Jean Tinguely’s metamechanics comes to mind, as does disproportion, pink stationary, heavy lifting and vodka. Not just in the sublime, as Kant thought, but in all beauty the author mediates objectivity with a cue stick and lets calculus do the rest. One becomes conscious of own’s own nullity and compensates for it with a foreignness that pokes at things with a long thin feeling. What such an aesthetics does when it finally gets off the ground no one can really say. The privilege of the artist is to see with the work’s own eyes. One might call it a clairvoyance. And is a borderline.

 

What Happens When You Open A Book Of Incongruous Dimensions

 

No trifle is but a trifle but has just as much bearing as a massive outdoor knife lying on the ground under a swaying punching bag and that is my mystification that a thing can be so blunt and immediate and yet so enigmatic God is not what consciousness knows God is what consciousness is before it knows anything at all the natural sphere of what Heidegger termed unshieldedness is the invisible and interior of consciousness slopping around in my head all day I feel a stirring in my inertia I need an antenna to hear your shirt the fabric is so glittery and full of conviction the gold toilet stolen from Blenheim palace has probably been melted down into ingots and rings it makes you wonder what are poets for sometimes everything is nothing but mist kitchen knives bitter regrets I’m in awe of whatever autonomy life affords there are no absolute structures in the cosmos a poem starts out as a story and ends with a spirit of anything goes 

Everything is what it is by relation with another the world that surrounds us is diversified and teeming with life after striking down the demons of capitalism I went to work on a parable about a violin concerto that I chewed with my eyes the devils of analysis sip at the troughs of science most of the time I’m an engine of glass an imbroglio of inalienable curls what I’m doing now can only be described as a form of scrap metal the sky is everyone’s titular destination the lightning has the smell of raw leather not unlike the upholstery in a Nevada brothel celebrating the extraordinary is an effrontery to the blasphemies of wealth that prostitutes everyone and puts our own life out of reach

I solve my problems by walking around in circles until I find a place that has not yet split into subject and object and when that is accomplished I feel oval and shiny and shaped by internal forces I feel lighter I feel inventive and wonderfully subversive contrary as a puncture and easy as a forefinger in Edinburgh pointing at a UFO

Special relativity rests almost entirely on the fact that the laws of physics exist independently of the particular form of those laws it’s the grammar of phenomena in which physics is written the grievances of old age challenge my nerves to sip the wine of dissolution while my craving for music drives the urge to pound the air with my tongue it’s a funny feeling to feel oneself slipping away it’s simultaneously sad and euphoric according to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle virtual particles pop in and out of existence ad infinitum the quantum foam of space is a bubbling cauldron of vulvas and bells

10:41 a.m. my stream of thought is briefly interrupted by the thud of footsteps the city crew hasn’t begun the work on the road as yet which is why we had to move our car from our parking lot which will be blocked for an indefinite amount of time we’ve already grown somewhat accustomed to the pandemic of incompetence negligence ignorance hypersensitivity victimhood orgies today’s trending searches on Google brain eating amoeba national parks cloudfare layoffs noaa forecasts northern lights visible across northern united states the northern lights are mentioned in Ezekial in the Old Testament “I looked, and I saw a windstorm coming out of the north–an immense cloud with flashing lightning and surrounded by brilliant light” Pentagon begins release of UFO files mom mistakes alligators fighting on her porch for home intruders in Ave Maria, Florida

I remember one summer years ago standing knee-deep in ice cold water near the spray and thunder of Snoqualmie Falls you can’t go there now they’ve blocked it off the park department restricts everyone to a boardwalk you have to crane your neck and study it at an angle as recent as the 90s people could jump from a rock and swim close enough to get a face full of spray this has been the history of the United States it started with barbed wire and quickly escalated to parking tickets and criminalizing poverty I’m fascinated by islands remote places too small to become an empire too warm and pretty to reprove the poor too rocky to become a golf course too cracked and fissured to become a resort

In the end, I opened book of incongruous dimensions like a door and felt meaningful toward anyone I touched it was called Desperado and read like a tarantella of rotating blades the protagonist wore Technicolor cufflinks and had a shadow as long as a Pythagorean tetractys there was an overall sense of dread combined with a soupcon of grenadine settling on the bottom of each page it was based on The Trouble with Being Born by Emil Cioran but with obvious infusions of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance most of it took place in my head since I was reading it while the plot simmered quietly somewhere behind a paragraph and miners panned for gold in the local creek which was fed by an imagination we all share in the quantum field where the emptiness of interstellar space is a buzzing, energetic sea of potentiality I love it I love it all the void the vacuum the improbability of it all shattering common patterns and leaving new ones behind what more could anyone ask there are rivers there are boons and congruities cairns cables habits haiku idioms igloos lamas quantum fluctuations we need nothing ask for nothing nothingness is such a grand propeller my medication can wear it with oysters in the firmament among all the poems singing at its inauguration