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--for Wallace Stevens and Harold Bloom
I
Vocation as an Abstraction
Nota: Man is the intelligence of his soil.
Though as sovereign ghost, is he not also host?
Talk of Socrates and Nietzsche's Superman
Still leads one to consider the lassitude
Of a Crispin or a Nobodaddy,
A Leopold Bloom, and Nimble at school.
For years, he split and dissected
The human brain, pricked its surface,
Split it length-wise, cross-wise, and upside down.
Preceptor to the mind? The soul? Nimble
Created doubt to twin with faith-- faith in a
Poetry of first order-- the pounding, peering
Imagination, succumbing though, to the sterile
Monotony of memorization:
The cranial nerves, their connections,
Great commisures and decussations
Of axons and dendrites, their billion
Synapses, loci of electrical storms--
But no prime mover; no god of Being
Anywhere in its gyri or sulci,
Magnificent convolutions of mass jelly.
Brain cutting only left him with the nagging
Stink of dull, formless formaldehyde.
Where are we in this mass of dendritic
Arborizations? Firing, unfiring,
All reduced to empty space, arcs, tracks,
Revolutions of sub-atomic ions,
Quarks, muons, bosons, electrons--
Invented by Man, dependent on Man,
Disbelieved by Nimble-- discounted;
Not part of him, empty and dry.
The imagination starts and stops
Always with a fiction, a fraud, an empty
Phenomenon to hook it, mutilate it,
Then let it free, yet when free-floating,
So needs 'ethos' and 'pathos' to power
The 'logos' of the sensor, the sensing
Nimble still peering into sulci-- the empty
Space between the lobes of grey matter;
Nothing but what it was, and is, without him?
Is the self a longing-- fluid, unfixed,
Rattling around in a gelatinous,
Self-effacing, skull-bound, three-pound mass?
II
Concerning the Thunderstorms of Mount Sinai
The great medical school, its grand erection,
Edifice of Fifth Avenue pomp and praise,
Beckoned him, sensual was her power,
The lure of 'logos,' knowledge and success,
Manhattan shiek, the bosom of the world,
Professors, philosophers, and scholars
Of first order, poets unbending,
Truth-seekers and wisdom-winners
Playing with high rollers and power-brokers,
The poor platonists care-free and poor.
All were voices for Nimble, and of highest rank.
He loved his father, but here was the chief!--
The chairman who held his brain by his heart,
Wore a white coat and spoke softly
-- or so Nimble had thought.
It all happened here. His mentor
Showed it in his manners, in his walk,
Proud and fierce, wise beyond anything
Nimble sought in his dried-up Brooklyn--
Brooklyn punch-n-punk, Daddy's rough-n-tough,
Too tough for Nimble's fragile countenance
Blowing and bellowing on a Brooklyn wind,
The wafting grime and stagnation like
A Philip Guston painting-- big, bad, dirty.
But maybe it's the same in ivory towers.
So Nimble searched and looked, making it
Where Will and Power can, too, blow untamed,
Turning him inward once agian; again,
shining his intellect, his acumen,
Finding neuropeptides, neurotransmitters,
Molecules of meaning and strife. Maybe
It was the pleasure-seeking dopamine,
The hippocampus and amydyla
Like electron traps, the mesolimbic tracts
Just more scaffolding for a bedraggled,
Self-seeking, self-elating, slipping soul.
III
Approaching Manhattan
His education had only just begun,
Internship and residency a mere
Introduction-- fictive facts memorized,
Regurgitated, longing for his own
Careful smoothing, their edges sharp
Like unused scalpels, yearning for human
Hands, a plumpness, a roundness alien
To Nimble, yet part of the process:
To play and practices with personality.
But where to find it? Was it given?
Was self-affirmation ever complete?
Had it ever started? Would it ever end?
It was more than he could bear: his body,
His wholeness, to be, itself an instrument
Of peace. It was too much; like listening
To some high-toned Christian woman
Or some chit-chat church lady he never knew.
Others had pity and understood one's
Never prepared for death and dying
And prying into one's head-- anyone's:
The foci of demyelination, infarction,
Thrombosis and infection-- that they're attached
To someone gone, or to the poor bastard
Staring back at you with a smile you question
With a snicker and a sneer. Nimble felt it
But did not acknowledge it; no, he could not;
He was only idling, his brain not yet in his heart.
But it was not for nought; it was a process
He would soon discover; his patients would
Teach him more than he could see, the storms
In their heads storming in him. All the while
He just felt tired, a demi-god gone home.
IV
The Idea of a Community
Manhattan's academic winds blew breezily
Across the Hudson, leading Nimble
Not far from his created center. There, he
Wrapped himself with the trappings of human
Comfort, the guise of holy humanity:
Marriage, children, church,
Gentleman fathers on similar quests,
Nimble still seeming starched and white.
He would have to lay hands, he thought,
Though holy he was not; he liked the look,
The feel, the way of his mentor, his guru,
Even his father as he imagined him to be;
For where does one exist, if not in the mind?
And the patients would come: the whole
Mass of humanity stampeding through:
The rich, the poor, the serious and silly,
The dying, the malingering, the liars,
The criers, the young and the old.
No match with his silver-gilded mind,
They lit a fire-- bright, hot, but opaque,
Pentecostal and foreboding.
And one day it would try his soul,
For they needed love and understanding;
And their pains could not be seen. They didn't
Hold their thalami in trembling hands,
Nor slapped their frontal lobes on trays
Soaked in serotonin or acetylcholine.
They didn't know they had midbrains
And couldn't care what connected to what.
It hurt is what they knew, and that hurt Nimble;
He couldn't understand; no, he couldn't feel
Where he ended and they began, his only
Prior pain, the busted appendix numbed
By his dad with a cheap, short-aged scotch.
So one joins a community where eveyone
Suffers and dies, loves and lies, feeling things
Nimble could not. No, he would suffer his own,
The mind gripping mind, his own slow, distinct
Long-winding path on the other side of Faith.
V
A Nice shady Home
Nimble was a hermit among the rest,
Dwelling on a modest strip of soiled green,
Between a Manhattan skyline, sleek and clean,
And the darker, rolling upsate hills,
Both metaphysical extremes of mind
And matter in all that surrounds:
Peers, patients, neighbors and friends,
All needing what was ill-defined between
Two realities 'out there' and 'in here.'
Just where one could position oneself,
Metaphysically inclined as Nimble was?
His own illness was stealthier still,
Boundless, unfelt-- except in all of him:
Malady of mind as lost consciousness,
And of one body... One body, the larger self,
Which, when diseased, portends a nothingness
Worse than pain, as vast void from which
Nothing springs. Oh, if only in the brain,
What a blessing still!
They called it spiritual, physical,
Psychological and emotional;
They thought it more than that, too.
Were they not as confused as him?
The ego bounces its opinions
When love cannot fix them in its place,
And Nimble's way was as rocky as the rest,
A Dante-esque journey, void of a Virgil.
So he took his little bitty, humble pill,
Big enough to stun his humming brain,
Thumping with a heartbeat, a rattling door.
Would he swing it open? Let the light in?
Its 'tap tap' was a somber lack of something more,
His brain a noisy engine, hearing voices,
Stepping out, but never long and never far.
VI
And Daughters with Curls (Apotheosis)
But there are four immeasurable truths:
Compassion as pity without the 'I,'
Equaninimity without indifference,
Sympathetic joy, and Loving kindness--
Each as all, and without the 'I,'
Anonymous, human and divine, like Nimble's
John, charioteer to Nimble's plight,
A Leopold Bloom to a Stephen Daedalus.
He would enter the wound, one small space,
Where selves, un-selves, and multiple selves
Create: creative work and creative play,
Forming forms from formlessness,
God's silent fingers playing the tune.
And it wouldn't stop in the cochlear nerve,
The auditory cortex, or Heschel's gyrus.
Nor could language and speech really begin
From the lobe of Broca, communication
Slpiced along a long-forgotten path.
O, wiz around it, and you're in the anus!
And there are neurons there too!
No, Nimble would find no place for love
In this great splendid mass-- the brain.
It would lay not in the heart, nor have a name,
Though he would find it everywhere
With John's immortal and inward-seeking eyes,
Where Nimble would die, dropping his whole self
Before John, their pleasure and pain
Rotating round an infinite axis
Like a tornado spun under the sun--
One mind, one body, one disease, one world,
Big Self taking care of Big Self,
The puny homunculus silenced and stilled.
It would pave a path to service:
To people with faces, smiles and braces,
Dimples and pimples, wrinkles and frowns,
Crow's feet and laughter, hearts and hands--
In short, what frightens most men most.
He would sound a new neural storm--
From Harmonium and Ideas of Order,
Through slow, sound strumming on a Blue Guitar,
To be part of a whole and Parts of a World,
On Auroras of Autumn in Transport to Summer--
And there, to land on The Rock, vanish
Nowhere and everywhere, one final trope,
A simple man and a last beginning.
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