Seeing and Saying

Geof Huth, "So Feet May Pray" (7 March 2012)
Part 1: Aporia

My desire is limitless but not my fill.

I am filled with a need to create, to make a mark (not on the world, but the page, the screen, the mind), and this desire pushes me to write more and more. Why? Just to get the words, the ideas, the shapes and colors and images out of me. Bingeless, I purge. But I cannot always do everything I want. Some days, some nights, I am too heavy with other focuses (or, occasionally, weariness) to do much making. Some, sure, but not much.

So last night, I followed the results of the Republican primary on Super Tuesday as anyone without a television in this TV Nation (All Rights Reserved) would be left to do. I listened to National Public Radio streaming on my computer, and I followed the live blogging on the New York Times' website, along with occasionally other news outlets. Since people had been voting for Republicans all day, I feared for this country. But I always do.

That's of no interest to me. What caught my attention was how the Republican Party is driven, primarily, by internal contradictions that its members cannot erase and cannot transform into something else. Essentially, the party is governed by two conflicting viewpoints. In the first case, the party is a religious party, focused on fealty to a Christian god and, thus, required by the tenets of their belief to care for the less fortunate, to love their neighbors, to turn the other cheek and live selflessly. The religious party of this country is Republican, and it is Christian, but it turns a blind eye, often, to the tenets of its religion, to those beliefs within it that are central to its definition.

Because, in the second part, the Republican Party is the party of Mammon, of money, of wealth. The party focuses its attention on the care of the wealthy over the care of the poor. Complaining incessantly about class warfare and the redistribution of wealth, the party is itself the progenitor of both. Just differently imagined. (We all use words broadly when we mean them narrowly, and the Republican Party is no different.)

Republican class warfare is the battle of the rich against the poor, a battle royale to protect the hard-earned money of the rich (particularly if it is earned in a way requiring little or no effort by the earner) against the ill-gotten gains (welfare, Medicaid, and their meager wages not sufficiently taxed as income though taxed significantly in terms of the sales tax) of the poor. Since the poor, though numerous and growing in number, are weak and the rich are powerful, the poor lose again and again, becoming poorer and less well off in all measures of quality of life.

In terms of redistribution of wealth, the redistribution has been upwards. Over the past three decades, since the Reagan revolution began in 1980, with me looking aghast at the television screen, the average income of the middle class has gone down when inflation is taken into account. The income of the rich has increased, and mightily. The super-rich are now the hyper-rich, and the disparity in income between the lowest and the highest rungs of the ladder are greater than they have ever been. Yet the Republican Party's focus is on protecting the wealth of the wealthy over the needs of the poor, the middle class, even the country as a whole. This makes it possible for quarter-billionaire presidential candidate Mitt Romney to promote a tax policy that would make him even richer, without any of his opponents criticizing him. Even though their proposals would more modestly reward Romney and more modestly bankrupt the nation while in putative search of the evanescent magic of trickle-down economics.

With thoughts like these, about a morally bankrupt but well bankrolled political class, how could I write? How could any of us write? (If you can read you can write, but would you want to?)



Part 2: Derridean

I sat, for the part of the day yesterday, with a therapist, carrying out the game of therapy, which to me is (as John Bloomberg-Rissman noted I made it sound) an art practice. I have to make it that to make it valuable to me, to make it interesting, and to make it possible for me to work with one of the bloodsuckers. My experience with therapists has been extremely negative and without value, but this psychologist seems a good and demanding foil to my resistance against the possibility of valuable change.

These conversations the two of us have are demanding to me, as a person both entirely open with the details of my life and completely opposed to releasing any information from my cranium. To deal with the pressures of the discussion, I have become more purely myself, a being of pure and abstract thought, rather than the shuddering mass of flesh I never wanted to be. (I recall the shock while, as a boy in Barbados, walking across the playing field and discovering two toads copulating and suddenly realizing that I was just as much an animal governed by a biological need to breed as were these toads. I realized I was not the perfectible machine I had imagined I was. Myths die horrible excruciating deaths.)

My self in this therapist's office is a person entirely analytical, constantly creative, and outrageously verbal. The entirety of my verbal skills (even, inexplicably, my command of meter) I somehow bring to the fore, as if to protect myself by this gaudy legerdemain. Yesterday, I used the word "Derridean" and the phrase "post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy," which I doubt happens often (just as I doubt it is a good sign of my process.)

And, worst of all, I plunge into intellectual explanations of how I understand the world and occasionally divert the conversations into long Shandean digressions, sometimes losing the fine thread of my point in the process. Oh, and I used the term "Shandean."

But yesterday I had a breakthrough, not personal or emotional or psychological (or any manner of thing not central to my being), but intellectual. I explained—and that verb is the most embarrassing part of this story—that I understood therapy in this way:

Every human being is a mass of contradictions. A single person is not a cohesive and logical whole. Instead, each one of us (just like the Republic Party) believes and acts in ways that conflict absolutely with other entirely natural ways in which we believe and act. So the act of therapy is the act of taking the person psyche apart in order to find those internal contradictions so that we can understand the text that we are. And, in order to complete the therapy (which is an act of reading a person as a text), we have to create a new person, a new text, that is the revelation of what the original text is, but which is something new and better and the goal of that process of therapeutic reading. This is how to come to understand the labyrinthine and subterranean circuitry of one's own mind.


Of course, I used the word "deconstruction" at some point in our discourse.

The therapist took notes, though I like to imagine she was just writing a grocery list, and our talking continued. I was never rude, but I felt that the force of my personality and opinions could have been too much, so I apologized if anything I had said (maybe "bloodsuckers") had offended her. According to her, it had not, and it didn't seem to me that it had, but I needed to be sure. I needed to be kind to her.

Life is best understood through the lens of literary theory.


Part 3: L'oeil

This morning, early, at 7:00 am, because I want to begin my day of work as soon as I can so I can end it as soon as I can, I went to see my doctor for a checkup. We ran through the regular routine. The nurse who weighed me said I weighed 160.3 pounds. I complained that that was more than I weighed on my own scale this morning, so she assured me that she had taken off two pounds for me shoes. I wanted to ask her, in jest, if she thought I was naked except for my shoes. She asked me how much I weighed this morning. "157," I said. She took my blood pressure and said that my diastolic reading (she said "lower number") was a little high. The doctor came in, took my blood pressure again, said it was fine. He asked me if I exercise. I assured him that I'm getting much less exercise than ever in my life. I asked him about a couple of skin problems and problems that occur during sleeping. He asked me if I needed any refills on my prescriptions. And we are done. We've done this many times.

But this day I asked something entirely new. I had meant to ask him about a problem with my eyesight, but I had forgotten all about it. (My focus on my health is lackadaisical at best.) In the few minutes I waited for him in the examination room, however, I experienced this vision problem twice. my vision fluttered, which felt like a fluttering in my eyes. When this happens, it lasts only a second or two, but the world before me shudders and I'm temporarily de-stabilized.

Apparently, this was a real issue, and likely means that my retinas are detaching. Being so incurious about my health, I didn't think until this very moment, many hours later, to ask him what the detachment of my retinas would mean to me. Instead, the doctor explained that I would have to see an ophthalmologist (which I realized only today has an l in the middle of it that I've never pronounced), and that that specialist would dilate my eyes to see what was up.

I could claim that I invented myself out of many things I couldn't do well enough: read, write, sing, draw, dance, perform. But one of the most important of these to me is seeing, which is what allows me to read, to write, to draw, to do so much that defines my life. And I am a visual poet, after all.

After arriving at work an hour later, I made an appointment with the ophthalmologist. The scheduler at that doctor's office wanted to give me an appointment for the mid-afternoon today. But I insisted on an appointment as late in the day as possible, which was only 3:30, so as not to lose much time at work. My appointment is a couple of weeks from today, just before I travel to Tennessee for my father's 75th birthday.

As the day progressed, strange things happened. I spoke on the phone to a county clerk friend of mine, and she explained that she had similar vision problems, which she was told was caused by using computer screens too much. I realized that almost no-one looks at a computer screen more than I do during the course of a day and night (likely over twelve hours each day), so I thought my chances of getting out of this eye problem unscathed were slight.



Part 4: Vyslexia

Whether by chance or the power of suggestion, I have experienced more examples of this fluttering of my eyesight throughout the day today. In the evening, my eyes merely felt off, as if over-tired and sore.

With all of these eye problems to contend with, I decided not to look at a screen for a while, so I decided to read one of the four books I'd bought on Monday: the shortest one, Philip Schultz' My Dyslexia. (I'll note that "dyslexia" is misspelled as "dislexia" once in the book: page 25.)

I picked up this slim volume because Philip Schultz is a poet I've never heard of, maybe because he's won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry (for his alliterative skills?), and because I read these few lines from one of his poems:

compost    lust and deluge    onelittlepiggietwoolittlepiggie [which I assume is a 
   misspelling of "onelittlepiggietwolittlepiggie"] eee ful

like ragin' urge    cause ieet huurts    it's allyacando    deer Gid

is: scream my fuckin' heedoff    first thun in da mournin duurrlin

As it turns out, this is the only slightly interesting bit of poetry in the book. The rest of the poetry he shows us is weak unimaginative writing, personal but not penetrating.

Which differs from his prose and the story of his dyslexia and his life. Schulz ends up telling a good story, one worth hearing, even if occasionally too didactic. (I should talk.) The story is touching, but not just concerning himself, also about the others who inhabited, sometimes only briefly, his life. I enjoyed the read, all of it, and occasionally became choked up.

Maudlin, I know, but live a life without crying and you'll be a machine. I figured out, once, that it's not possible to do. 

I read the book while sitting on my futon, a lamp lighting from behind me, and the Governor's mansion just outside the window in front of me. I pulled my glasses off and read with the pages of the book close to my face, my nose almost touches, and sometimes smelling, the words.

As I read, I kept seeing, in the upper periphery of my peripheral vision, a black shape dart across the window, but whenever I looked up it was gone. I assumed there was another bat in the apartment, and, for reasons I cannot explained, that worried me, as if I couldn't handle a bat. I have no fear of bat, I think they are beautiful creatures, and I've caught bats in buildings and released them into the night at least three times in my life.

When the flash of blackness came again, I closed my eyes, believing at that point that this effect was a symptom of my apparent retinal problem. And I thought, "Sometimes you close your eyes and see the place you used to live, when you were young," but maybe that was because I was listening to the music of The Killers over and over again obsessively. In the brief darkness of my eyeshut, I stared into infinity, and I was overcome with dread. Brief and mild, but dread.


My brain is wired for loneliness, it seems. Here I was reading obsessively, preparing to write obsessively, listening to music obsessively. I was not existing as a human interacting with others, and maybe (I think this frequently) I shouldn't be. Maybe I should learn to live productively alone, since production is my major goal. "The cure for loneliness," as Marianne Moore said and as Philip Schultz reminded me today, is solitude."

That's what I thought was the answer. Except for one problem. I imagined what life would be like if I suddenly went blind, if the black flash across the ceiling grew big enough to engulf my entire eyesight. I wondered how I would call for help, and I tried to enter the password for my cellphone to see if I could make a telephone call. With my eyes closed, I never succeed in getting my four-key password correct, and I tried so many times that my phone locked itself.

I realized that I didn't even have a phone I could use as blind person. I imagined how I would solve problems as a blind person: how I would organize my electronic files (which are voluminous), how I would find my poems, how I would get to the hospital once I went blind. I surmised I was being given up on by my eyes, which didn't care if they could see anymore because I had used them so much, that I had used everything up.

This was a passing concern. I concluded that it would be unlikely that I would go blind, especially by today. All I could do was wait and see (the pun is important) what would happen. I read deeper into the book and ran across a reference to Walker Percy's novel The Moviegoer. I hadn't thought of Walker Percy for years even though he was once a favorite novelist of mine, but I mentioned Percy today at work to Dave Lowry, and I discussed only one of Percy's novels: The Moviegoer.

Coincidences prove only one thing: that events you think are unlikely to happen do happen.


Part 5: Code & Coda

Having shared intimate details of my life with strangers, and others, I might as well admit that this blog, from the start, has been about the dispersion and restitution of my self. It is, in effect, a huge unwieldy lyric poem, an autobiography. And the reason I bought three books of autobiography this week is that I believe in autobiography, I believe the telling of the story of one's life can be revealing, and I believe we understand ourselves by tearing ourselves apart, throwing those parts away, and bringing those parts back together. As Baudelaire wrote, and Schultz reminded us again of tonight, "The dispersion and restitution of the self. That's the whole story."

I created only three poems today, four if you count this one. Two of these were pwoermds I found within the text of Schultz' book, and one was a short spokepoem I created on the spot by recording it into my phone, a devise as important to me as my eyesight. I had a vague idea for another poem but didn't hold onto it long enough to begin to make a poem. And now it's gone. It's okay if I didn't write another poem. Anyway, how can I write a poem when I'm so busy living one?

Reading about dyslexia today, I realized how undyslexic I am, how text is the pure water of meaning to me, how I can put words together in a moment and tear them apart in another moment, how I can read and write fluently, how I can pull words and their meaning into my ear in a single fluid movement. And how I depend on these skills, which, for me, are aural, oral, visual, and manual skills that come together into one skill. I have found them within myself, torn them apart, and put them back together into one thing, one text of skills, that I can now comprehend.

I drink this river of words I write and this river of words I read and hear. Words aren't water. They are l'eau de vie.

Writing this tonight, I've come to understand that I can't understand things unless I break them apart. And some things I cannot break into small enough pieces.

The self, transfixed, transpersonal, transmuted, transitory, is one such thing.


ecr. l'inf.