Archives for July 2015

Not too long ago, I posted a poem called “Esse Est Percipi” in this blog (It’s on the “Poems” page and a piece of the post “Thanksgiving Thoughts”). It is a poem about how I am coping with my vision loss. It turns out that it is really about how my brain is coping with vision loss. Just yesterday, I learned that what I am experiencing happens to about one-third of patients losing their vision. It is called Charles Bonnet Syndrome. A precursor to Darwin, Bonnet was an 18^th century philosopher/naturalist who diagnosed the condition in his own grandfather.  Below is what I discovered in an article by Alan Wells at damninteresting.com about CBS. It is a fascinating “phantom limb”-like response to vision loss:

“Consider that each human eye normally receives data at a rate of about 8.75 megabits per second, a bandwidth which is significantly greater than most high-speed Internet connections. The visual cortex is the most massive system in the human brain, and it is packed with pathways which manipulate the rush of visual data before handing it over to the conscious mind. When disease begins to kink this firehose of information, a legion of neurons are left standing idle.”

Which means the brain compensates for the lack of visual data by creating it—a visual hallucination that appears very real but that I consciously know is not there. As you can see from my poem, “I am trying to make friends with what I see.” I also just learned that the course of Charles Bonnet Syndrome is between twelve and eighteen months. What started out as nausea and disorientation began to be less alarming and (occasionally) be amusing. It feels like my brain has gone too far and is providing illusions that flow through me in a dream-like sequence, sometimes common, sometimes comforting, sometimes still a little alarming. It has become experiential and now it may, just as quickly, be gone.

How much, I wonder, does the brain normally supply that is not part of what is objectively perceived? I read, in my research, that the brain fills in the blind spot of the optic nerve. How much more does it create?

“Human perception is patently imperfect, so even a normal brain must fabricate a fair amount of data to provide a complete sense of our surroundings. We humans are lucky that we have these fancy brains to chew up the fibrous chunks of reality and regurgitate it into a nice, mushy paste which our conscious minds can digest. But whenever one of us notices something that doesn’t exist, or fails to notice something that does exist, our personal version of the world is nudged a little bit further from reality. It makes one wonder how much of reality we all have in common, and how much is all in our minds.”

Which raises a more interesting question about consciousness and bias and the story we tell ourselves about who we are.

In a way, we poets are our own audience. From Birmingham to Berkeley to Burma we discover one another, a common ground established between the pages of our books or online presence, a sharing that goes beyond the language of understanding of one another. For me, poetry is closer to the sense of smell than it is to the art of discourse. It is more a way of feeling with someone than talking to someone; a way of reclaiming a shared inner sense of the world.

It works like this: poetry is a kind of thinking that gets where it wants to go only by heading in the opposite direction. For example, by concentrating on not telling the truth.  The reason there is nothing as useless as yesterday’s news is that it has successfully fulfilled its function. The news, once told, is no longer. For me, even as I am the poet writing my own poem, if I understand it too soon, I ruin it for myself. Poetry succeeds by putting on a mask in order to see itself, by glancing sidelong, by sneaking up on the subject matter, by surprise, by music, by sleight of hand, by illusion, by verbal magic!

For the writer as well as the reader, poetry operates through:

• A state of suspended cynicism.
• An unsystematic derangement of the senses.
• A willingness to see parts as wholes.
• To invest oneself in pieces of things, or places, or people, and to raise that investment to the level of vision, of how it might be seen, a personal vision.

The Art of Poetry

Once more, buddy, your last ride
has left you behind and nothing can be done.
You want someone to come, a silver angel,
to seize your hair and lift you from the earth.

But the weight of your two feet
presses against the ground.  No one comes
to save you.  It’s too cold to stand still
and too dark to run.

Once more, buddy, you write
to save yourself.  Here’s the barn.
Here the horses are warm.  Here, on a dark
night, between towns, between meals,
simply the heat of other animals is enough.