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.

1. Avoid linear, sentence syntax. Shift frame of reference whenever possible. Try to create the illusion of seeing things from many angles at once, in a compressed time and space.
2. Alliterate as a response to the absence of run-ons, then use run-ons.
3. Work images into the poem as though they were part of an apparently flat statement. Make the image work as a surprise:

                                      the way time sits in your mouth
                                      like cold sunshine and doors
                                      wink open around you.

4. Use concealed rhymes, rhyming end words in the middle of the next line, asynchronous rhymes. Use the anticipated and unexpected rhyme. Make it accountable to the ear, not the rhyme.
5. Maintain an honest narrative thread that is resolved somewhere in the poem. There should always be something at stake in the poem that is resolved by the end. There should occur a feeling of something completed by the end of the poem, of closure.
6. Never worry about what’s being said until after it’s been said. As Richard Hugo once said, “Those who worry about morality probably ought to.”

The Artist

Everyone is an artist, he said,
inside. Inside there is someone
very, very old, someone only
an ancestor would recognize,
someone sheltered in a doorway
singing songs in a dew dropping cold,
singing songs we always seem to know
as if we’d heard the words long, long ago.

should be built to let in light

yet not destroy what’s inside them.

Gail and I were invited to attend an elder circle in Bolinas, California. The agenda was open—we could talk about anything that came to mind. We thought it was a gathering of people in their 60s and 70s and the discussions were going to range from end-of-life issues to what was going on in the current culture. We drove down with two friends—Bing and Eleanor from Point Reyes—to Bolinas, to a ranch we understood was dedicated to fostering new ways of living, farming, and community outreach. We arrived at the tail-end of a two-or three-day conference. The conference was for young people to discuss land use, urban issues, and community organizing. There were chairs arranged in a circle around a large fire pit that was already going nicely in the gathering dusk, the smell of the salt-sea air surrounding us, and owls hooting nearby. A young fox wandered over, intrigued at the circle of us, and then wandered on by. We all looked over at him and he looked at us and then he passed on.

We began by going around the circle to introduce ourselves and share statements of gratitude. James, the leader of the group, made it clear that everybody’s opinions were important and everybody’s thoughts were welcome and he invited everyone to participate. Just then, the youth organizational meeting finished its last session and they joined us around the fire. And before anybody else could speak, one of the younger members from that group shared his statement of gratitude. The smoke from the fire swirled and washed over us as he began talking, as dusk slowly sifted its way towards darkness.  He said his name was Daniel.  Daniel had a friend—whose name was also Daniel—that he had met in Costa Rica at another youth organizational meeting. And he had just heard recently that his friend Daniel had killed himself. For his turn, he said he was grateful for his friend, grateful for having known him. They were both activists trying to combat climate change, trying to organize people to bring awareness to the youth of the world about the issues and dangers of climate change. He said that it’s really difficult to be a young person in today’s world because it feels as if there is no future, there is no way or path forward, all of our avenues are blocked. It is very, very difficult to be young in today’s world, he repeated. He paused and looked down and everybody went silent waiting for him to continue.

He took a deep breath and looked back up around the circle.  “My question to the elder group is: what advice do you have to give to us, to those of us who are wanting to help make the necessary changes for a better world, but feel hopeless about how to go forward?”

It seemed as if he was looking at each one of us individually. We all studied him in return, sitting a little dejectedly in the circle, holding his hands in his lap. Daniel’s question hung in the air. The fire crackled in the long silence. Everybody digested Daniel’s concern in his or her own thoughts.

After a long pause, James spoke up conversationally. “You know, I’m just an old dude. I can only tell you what this old dude thinks. I’m over 70 and I’ll tell you what I have learned about the future. The truth from my point of view is: I don’t know any answers. I don’t know what the future holds. I don’t know any answers for any of our problems. It’s important to me to say this out loud: I don’t know and I don’t believe anybody else knows. We are making it up as we go along. We all are living in a dream that we confuse with some hard and fast reality, but making it up gives us an advantage. Once you realize that everybody is making it up, that we are all living in a dream, you now have the power (since you are making it up) to reframe the issues, so that future doesn’t begin and end with fear. Our culture is driven by fear-mongering, fear mongers, people who want you to be afraid. They want you to fear what’s coming—whether it’s assassins or terrorism or even just political disagreements—everybody’s just making it up. It’s a propaganda issue. It’s an advertising issue. It’s a political issue. When people are afraid, they are easier motivate and to control. This is just the opinion of one old dude telling you that. But by realizing that we can choose to make up this dream of reality to suit our own needs, all of us, we can reframe it so that there is a way to understand future choices with compassion and love. There is a way to see it differently than the way the media would have us see it. We are all one. We are all part of this Earth. We are all one nation. We are all facing it, the life on this planet. This planet is our home. This place is what we are made of. We are part of it. We fit into an ecosystem. What we need to learn to do, with love and compassion, is learn to live within the ecosystem that we have found ourselves in and make something of it that’s worth having. We can join together, all of us, recognizing we are all one generation. We can go forward because there is strength knowing all of us can literally lean on each other. We are one nation, we are one species, we are one life form living with other life forms. We are all in this together.”

“There was a time,” he said, “when I was an infant, when there were only two or three billion of us on the planet. Now we are seven billion and growing. We need to learn to adjust to what’s out there, what we have in store. The key here is to know that we don’t know. No one knows. We can reframe the issue. We can build an understanding, from the bottom up, through the power of this one generation, this last generation. Regardless of how old you are, how old we are, we are in this together and we have the power. We have the power to see for ourselves how to live and how not to be afraid and how not to fear what we have in store. We have to learn to share with each other the eco-space that we have, that has been given to us.”

In response to James’s soliloquy about the thoughts of “one old dude,” Daniel said it occurred to him that, had his friend Daniel been able to find elder group to turn to, he might have found a way to live and not to die.

The smoke from the fire drifted over the circle and it occurred to me what a valuable time this has been, this simple gathering of elders and young people sitting in a circle, talking to each other, really talking to each other, and how valuable such a thing can be.

It’s important to reiterate that the key to understanding how to reframe an issue comes from the strength of knowing that we don’t know the answer. As we old dudes say, “No one knows.” The future is undetermined. Once we realize that, if we could join together and dream together with warmth and compassion, we can reframe the issues that determine the future. We can recognize what’s happening to the planet. We can go forward with an understanding of what can be done in our lifetime and how to take a stand to make a difference. Another note to take into consideration: this was just one element of the elder circle gathering. There were many ranging discussions: sustain-ably growing your own food while living in an urban environment; conservation; how to support a community that gathers strength organizing itself, empowering individuals to take charge of their lives. Rather than becoming victims of a society that is currently trying to rule by fear, we can avoid these outcomes by recognizing what we can do as people who gather their power from each other.

• Why I write: I write to discover myself. Who I am. That irreducible sense of myself that follows me wherever I go. When one is called upon to find something that expresses a reality beyond the pedestrian. I write to discover realities by opening myself and becoming willing to take away the censor that controls what can be said and what can’t be said.
• Why I read: I read poetry to enter into an intimate conversation with a fellow human being who has worked with the craft of poetry and is willing to try and perfect a linguistic structure that allows us to enter into his/her shared reality. An example of what I’m talking about is this poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins:

Spring and Fall
To a young child

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow’s springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

• What does William Carlos Williams mean by the quote, “It is difficult/to get the news from poems/yet men die miserably every day/for lack of what is found there?” Richard Hugo once told me, “You don’t have to know what a poem means, all you have to know is that poet knows what it means and that his meaning is a shared experience.”
• It strikes me that what Williams means is something similar to what Hugo is talking about—this shared experience that can be captured with words. In Galway Kinnell’s obituary, it is stated thusly: “Through it all, he held that it was the job of poets to bear witness. ‘To me,’ he said, ‘poetry is somebody standing up, so to speak, and saying, with as little concealment as possible, what it is for him or her to be on earth at this moment.’”
• Adyashanti, a Buddhist monk, recently expressed the opinion that poetry attempts to articulate the irreducible quality of things. The thing is just the thing, not in anything said about it. There are no things. Everything is a process. Words can both reveal and conceal. Whenever you call it one thing, you’ve eliminated other things. Don’t walk in someone’s mind with dirty feet. The thing you take away from a poem did not come from the words themselves.

I wrote the following words in a letter to my family and friends about this time last year:

“[Due to complications with my vision] I have stopped driving and I have stopped playing tennis. My mobility is limited and my activities are limited and, furthermore, all my activities are now somewhat circumscribed. What do I mean by that? Well, for example, it is harder for me to read the expression on people’s faces, which is a major clue in conversation, which leads to awkwardness and confusion on my part. And embarrassment. Then, all my insecurities rise to the surface and I am not as confident that I know how to proceed in any given circumstance.”

While they are still true, I have also been embracing a new way of perceiving the world. I recently made a trip to my oncologist and discovered that my cancer is in remission and I am essentially cancer-free. This information meant more to me than I imagined. I began to realize that the future had opened up again, that I had closed down my sense of future expectations. I wrote recently that once the foundational lies that support our personality are exposed, what one is left with is emptiness. Let me elaborate. I have come to an understanding that much of what I thought of as my “life story” was illusory.  A made-up story of who I am. I am not any one thing or any one story. I am not my past. I am not my future. I am alive in the present moment. So, if the story of one’s life is an illusion— in some cases, a delusion— what remains is a made-up story that can be looked at, appreciated, for what it is. Changed. Accepted or rejected. But the trick is to let it be what it is: the understanding of a  life story appreciated as a story worth telling.

Sam Harris, in his book Waking Up, talks about being able to both be a part of the story as well as the witness of the story. Being the witness of one’s own life. It’s a challenging concept, but I think of an earlier philosopher telling us that the unexamined life is not worth living and I think he had something in mind very similar to what Sam Harris is talking about. To see and accept what is about your life has been, for me, the first step in being able to reconcile my understanding that cancer and Parkinson’s and glaucoma are realities that I have learned to live with—my limitations, though not welcome and occasionally depressing, are not defining.

As for my current state of health, I like to tell this story of the monk, who was chased out of the forest by a tiger. He ran to a cliff and scurried over, down a vine to get away, only to discover another tiger at the foot of the cliff trying to get at him from below. Then, looking around, he noticed a rat, poking its head out of a crevasse, had begun to chew on his vine. Then, looking off to his right, he realized there were some wild strawberries within reach. And they were so delicious.  As for me, I am enjoying the strawberries, I have nothing to complain about. What is behind me and in front of me is just that: behind me or in front of me. They are not here.

ESSE EST PERCIPI

To be is to be perceived.

 — Bishop George Berkeley

1. REMOVING THE BANDAGES

A canopy of white guy-wires

sweeps skyward as we cross the new Bay Bridge

into San Francisco.

I cannot see the Ferry Plaza,

the Transamerica Pyramid,

gray Embarcadero monoliths

reflecting stark afternoon light.

I listen to the rhythmic thrum of tires.

Instead of the cityscape, my brain creates

leafless winter trees

rising over open meadows

floating past the car window

highway to Tuscaloosa,

Alabama winter-green grass going brown.

I know this image is all wrong.

But the grass sways with the motion of the car.

2. RETURNING HOME

Winding up the two-lane road

past the California landscape:

manzanita, bay, live oak and evergreen.

I remember leafy shadows, evening light

but I see the tall red brick tenements

stretching up 14^th Street, NYC,

Lower East Side, 1970,

as far as my eye can see.

Where do they come from?

The buildings waver, remain following me

around the curve, over the creek.

As we drive on, the mirage

disappears in oncoming headlights.

I am learning to make friends with what I see.

Not what’s there.

3. LETTING GO

“Take a look at this photograph.”

The page of the album turns

in a crisp November light,

colors swirling: red-brown, rose, white, grey.

No form, no shape.

“Isn’t she beautiful?”

“What am looking at?” I ask.

“Nate and Kelsey, at the altar,”

and the grey becomes my son’s suit

the rose-red a bridesmaid’s dress

and the sun gleams clear

through the redwood canopy.

This past weekend, our beloved daughter returned from a three-month sojourn in Southeast Asia and the next day we traveled to Quincy, California, for an amazing family experience. My eldest son, Demian, had a milestone birthday on same day as the rehearsal dinner for youngest son, Nathan. There was a bonfire under the stars. Nathan and his beautiful new wife, Kelsey, were wed the next day in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. One couple, Max and Karin, wrote a song for them. Kelsey’s father performed the service, a non-religious, open ceremony, which included both families. The weather was filled with the feel of Indian summer and everyone felt the love in the air.  It was a whirlwind of wonder, a beautiful time I will always cherish. I was invited to give a toast.  I am so blessed by my family, that I can’t resist the impulse to share.

When people enter into marriage, they also enter into the family structure of their new spouse, and all the eccentricities that implies. Our family, in particular, is what we affectionately refer to as a “Berkeley blended family.” That’s a challenge that I need not go into now. You’d need a flow chart to see all the interconnections and relationships. But I think that that conscious commitment we make to each member of the family is what makes our bond strong and loving. I’d like to speak a moment generally about the nature of families. The strength of a good family depends upon honesty and integrity and loyalty. Honesty because, within the family structure (those with whom you have the closest relationships), honesty is critical. One needs to be able to trust in the support and feedback of family to live a meaningful existence. One needs to believe in the integrity of the family bonds, because the embrace of family is important in order to go forward with belief in oneself: to learn, and to grow, and to sometimes make mistakes. Because in a strong family, loyalty is unconditional. It is only with family that one can depend on the forgiveness for transgressions. We are not perfect. We need the support of our family when we make mistakes and have to be forgiven. We are a family of talkers and we talked about honor, integrity and loyalty when Nathan was little. We talked about the nature of honor. We don’t do it for others, honor is a gift we give ourselves. It defines us. Nathan’s character allows him to see the path ahead, make clear what otherwise would be confusing, face every challenge with a “can-do” attitude. We say Nate can get it done. Whether competing in the half-Iron Man triathlon (5 hours and 33 minutes) or winning first place in the state championship in gymnastics, or single-handedly launching a new product for a new company, Nate excels in whatever he tries to do. In that way, he and Kelsey are alike. They challenge and complete each other fearlessly. As Lao Tzu said, “Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.” I want to welcome Kelsey into this shared reality of our family. Besides being smart and beautiful, Kelsey fit in almost immediately. It was like she had always been a part of us. She was one more piece of our family puzzle. Once in place, the picture seemed clear—she was the right fit for Nate. And the right fit for the family, too. Weddings are like births. They are the new beginnings. Let’s all raise our glasses and toast to Nathan and Kelsey: love, strength, courage, family, and new beginnings.

In the early 2000s, when blogging started becoming all the rage, I began a blog post called Nevada City Sisyphus on BlogSpot. If anybody read it, no one ever mentioned it in electronic response. Around that time, I also discovered Red Room, a community of writers started by the independent Small Press Distribution in Berkeley. Beyond being a BlogSpot, Red Room was a real community of writers. Exciting new technology and new times! The blogosphere continues to grow but, unfortunately, Red Room did not. They were recently acquired by Wattpad, a platform for writers, but far less intuitive. Granted, posts are a little far between, but I prefer the easier interaction. To ease the world of blogging, I have archived my posts from both Nevada City Sisyphus (BlogSpot) and my  Red Room posts into Wordpress for now. I hope you enjoy them and feel free to comment. I’ll keep posting my political and philosophical thoughts as the mood strikes me. Maybe even share a poem or two. And, who knows? Couldn’t hurt to check Wattpad out in a while, too.