Dear Reader,
I never thought that I would live past my forties. I don’t know why I got that figure in my head, unless it was due to a book I read in high school: Martin Eden by Jack London. By the time I finished the book, I had strongly identified with the character and his disillusionment, the ultimate choice he made to stop living. It felt so real. I was young and had never considered whether life might not be worth living if you couldn’t live up to your expectations. It was the story of a man who rose from poverty and the school of hard knocks for the love a woman, through education, into a successful man of ideas and philosophical foundation so that he could challenge the best thinkers of his day and so become capable of challenging the current postures of the gilded upper class. But he had learned too much to be satisfied with the status quo.
That book changed me; it shook me awake to possibilities I had never considered: that one could succeed in the world and yet fail to live up to his own inner expectations. The Self one creates is only an illusion, but it’s an important illusion. I continue to invent my Self one poem at a time.
This birthday I turned 82. I have multiple major conditions: cancer, Parkinson’s disease, glaucoma, Charles Bonnet Syndrome, spinal stenosis, and interstitial lung disease. My life expectancy is short. I am considering taking ownership of my own death and ending my life with the California Aid in Dying Act. But for now, I am learning to embrace what remains.
Charles
These poems create a magnetic hold on me. Everything in the everyday world is thrown into question. Blindness, and hallucinations provoked by disease, demand such a disciplined focus on everyday details of life that the world is immediately, startlingly unknown, our human presumptions dangerous. The narrator guides us through a world where to just walk across the room is like being in space. Time is questioned. One feels that to indulge in a sense of the world as familiar is a dangerously protective construct against uncertainty. But then it suddenly becomes, in these poems, a source of wonder, gratitude and beauty. Death indeed sits on our shoulder as a reliable guide, without which we fall victim to the maya of the world. It takes great stamina and love to see the world as it is; and to write about such experiences so clearly is a unique, generous gift.