Tabula Rasa Divination

Tabula Rasa Divination

Oh, those wiley friends of mine.

They tried to tell me

there were pages on the wall,

But their shifting shapes

with flashing hands and fluid feet,

all struggled to show it all.

"But there is divineness in the words," they'd offer in harmony,

"on the pages," I could not see.

"There should be pronouns", they would plea.

Some said "he."

some said "no"!

I could not agree.

I didn't know,

for there's nothing there to show.

"It's a Tabula Rasa", I then surmised.

"For the words have all been compromised."

So I stepped away

from the propaganda haze

and thought of all the ways

a rain drop sparkles on a vine

and said,

"Now that's an image of the divine!"

James Oliver Smith, Jr. (2013 0225)

Paying The Rent

Paying The Rent
---------------
(from Boston Rediscovered)

I'm paying the rent
for a bit of time
on Stuart and Tremont

I once ate roast beef
here
with horseradish
and sharp cheddar,
waiting behind
rope lines
and driven appetites
prodded by theatrics,
strip shows
and cheap cinematic screens
obscured by cigarettes
and gay boys miffed
by my desire
to actually see a film ...

It's a diorama
of my personal history,
somehow
infused
with airwaves
once announcing
body counts
and psychedelic sentiments
more brilliant than
supernova incandescence...

The Age of Aquarious
seems to have come
and gone
without the slightest whimper
of regret
or innocence--

It's all gone now,
that sharp thread
of raw curiosity
and unbridled
animosity...

The smokey screen
of the Stuart theater
now serves
Big Macs, Egg McMuffins and
Filet-O-Fish sandwiches
to the faces
of Chinatown...

and I now sit
with an Italian combo
and a cinnamon roll
to the sounds of
business chatter,
employee evaluations
and investment strategies...

Hair is no longer banned
in Boston

... it's been styled
for power

josjr (2012 0124)

The Evils Of Jazz

As seat-of-the-pants
as my plans for Boston were,
I was every bit as serious about
attending Berklee School of Music
as any seventeen year-old
could be ...

I'd seen the catalog --
I'd studied the images of
professors,
musicians
and
even the streets pictured
in the catalog,
over
and
over --

brownstone buildings,
Back Bay beauty
and Fenway fantasies
beguiled my jazz maze
incandescent bebop
vision phase ...

it was 1969,
the age of aquarius,
the home of academic protests,
bongo bistro sit-in music fests
in gardens, commons and city squares

to the tune of psychedelic-strafed
extemporaneous insanity
held hostage
in winding orange-blazed skin-head
Hari Krishna singers
dancing on the corner of
Boylston and Tremont
begging
forlornly to business suits
and afro-wielding
mini-skirt, frolic, hormone
vibrant, bell-bottom
leg romps
in the shadow of unrest
movies, hair-brained stage flames
and curious yellow
flourished
orations in the plums of
peeled-banana-LSD extravaganzas

bleeding on Herald-Traveler-Record-Globe
admissions
to culture
civil detonation

I observed it all
from three thousand miles
of innocence
interred

for it was jazz
I wanted
blazing from a bellowing bore
of brass, shellac and triggers
ripping
dirty tones
in a fusion melody

but my mother
tried to quell it all
with an attempted exorcism
of naive will
in Richland,
a preacher assigned to the mission
of declaring
the godless evil of music
contorted
and misconstrued from
straight and narrow flows
of righteous rivers running rampant
in the backwaters
nuclear servitude

but, there,
in the preacher's den
I syncopated
gloriously to the rhythm
biblical thumpitude

and ripped a delighted
glissando
as I left the church
in a cloud
of elated curiosity

inspired by Huntington Avenue,
the road
I craved
to
extract from picture
and tack to the bottoms of my
shoes

josjr (2012 1004)
Stowaway in Boston

Redstone Sunrise

Throughout the night
there was only the vast
emptiness of an
unknown sea
underneath,
giant waves
washing away a landscape
that had names,
colors,
people,
voices,
faces,

but they all seemed to be sucked
into tiny points of light,
crawling painfully,
slowly ––
like bugs or dust
or lost traffic signals
that had become
detached from poles,
wandering aimlessly.

The lush green of Seattle
for which I often lusted,
lamenting that the caravan
seem to be stuck
in some desert rut,
bogged down in desolate dunes,
where trees were exotic,
mountain scarce
and people all seemed
to be from somewhere else ––

but,
the reality is
I was never around long enough
to really know
where anyone was from
because they were all framed,
always
within the chrome borders
of the rearview mirror.

It was reminiscent of the
summer of '66,
where I spent many hours
on Coronado Beach
watching crabs
click sideways,
blowing bubbles
as I built cities
at the water's edge
and watched them dissolve
with each new wave.

This new, dark, sea
beneath my feet
dissolved it all,
a cosmic tidal wave
that left only slide positions
on my bass trombone twitching
my fingers,
my neck,
my lips ––
whispering arpeggios,
glissandos
and pedal tones
over and over
until the sunrise
revealed the beauty
of redstone urbanocity ––
the Hub,
Bean Town,

Boston.

josjr (2012 1003)
stowaway in Boston

Rattlesnake Eyes

That flight out of Seattle --
that flight in 1969 --
that leap from
a 17 year long caravan
was a catapult
from the dark crevice
I had been traversing
from birth.

As person born on a caravan
I didn't know
I was on a caravan.
I just jumped on the
wagon because
that's what I think I
supposed to do,

carried along
by the currents
of a stream
flowing down
whatever dry riverbed appeared
on the landscape,
and I held on --
not because I wanted to,
but because I didn't know
I didn't have to.

That's what I was thinking
when I stared out those
sterile Windows
of that United Airlines flight
rising above Mount Rainier --
blinkless,
cold,
uncompromising,
like the eyes of
rattlesnakes
I once hunted
along the igneous cliffs
outside of Connell,
every bit as frightened
of them
as they were
of me,

as I was of falling off
that caravan.

josjr (2012 1002)
Stowaway In Boston

Poem: Red Eye

Red Eye

Nomads have no home ...
only places seen,
the ground they're standing on
and some place
on the other side of
midnight.

I was once a stowaway
on a caravan I called family,
born on a dairy farm
outside of Houston,
thrown into the trunk
of an old Studebaker
headed west,
but not before picking up
the scent of fresh shrimp
in Corpus Christi
and the taste of countless
Concorde grape filled
communion cups
in a string of mildew soaked
Texas Southern Baptist churches.

Just like any ol' sailor
weary of too much time between
here and there,
I have many stories to tell
on an idle day,
about those first seventeen years,
but the short story is a
frantic tale
of five states and thirty moves
that ended when I jumped out of
the caravan called family
on the banks of the Columbia River
with a dual-trigger bass trombone
in my hand.

The plan was simple:
take the ninety bucks from
graduation
and buy a one-way ticket to Boston
to become a jazz musician.

It was a red eye out of Seattle --
My first flight,
lifting above the lights
and mountains
and nomads
without faces
and homes
and purpose,

on the other side of midnight.

Stowaway In Boston
josjr (2012 1001)

I Am Going Blind ...

Preliminary note:

This is quite definitely an exploratory piece that is targeted for the beginning of a nonfiction book on my vision loss over the past twenty five years (Into The Haze). It is my initial effort to set the tone, establish the context and present the voice of the book to follow. Feedback on any and every aspect will be appreciated.                                            

Into The Haze

Part 01

Seeing and Perceiving

Chapter 01

I Am Going Blind

I am going blind. There is no other way to say it. However, I have tried to express this reality in ways that seemed adequate, but they are all euphemisms, expressions that soften the blow of the reality, but the reality remains: I am going blind.

If I say "I have pigment dispersion glaucoma" or "I am vision impaired" I would not be telling a lie. Both statements are true. Both statements are facts. They are static declarations that imply a stabile condition. They say that there is something within me that is different than the norm. They say that I have a problem, but they don't give any indication of what that means. Glaucoma simply means that something has raised the pressure within my eyes. Like blood pressure there is no pain and no indication that anything will happen as a result. For untreated high blood pressure, the end result is death. For untreated pigment dispersion glaucoma, the end result is blindness. But for high blood pressure there is a treatment and life goes on. No one needs to know anything has ever happened because there is no visible or behavioral residual effect. With pigment dispersion glaucoma, though, there are no treatments that stop it, only delay tactics. The end result is, inevitably, blindness. The only variable is the timing.

An overly simplified metaphor would be one in which a person lives in a large room where 1000 light bulbs are installed an lit in the ceiling. Each day, one light bulb is turned off. Over the course of 1000 days, the ambient light in the room would be reduced at an almost imperceptible level with each lost bulb. Our marvelous human adaptability would simply operate at some "normal" level with each new day, not being conscious of the diminished luminosity. Eventually, we will start to get the impression that the room seems darker, but it will be easily brushed off as a figment of our imagination. It will not be until we are unable to perform important tasks like reading, cooking, writing and other activities that we will become serious about finding a solution. If there is no solution we do what we can until the last bulb is turned out. Then we start depend entirely on our other senses and do what we can.

In my case, I can throw other complexities into the room, like fun house mirrors that distort all images. I could add a steam or smoke machine that clouds the air, removing the clarity of the air. For extra measure, I could put on glasses that are calibrated for an incorrect strength, removing visual accuity. Then, to make everything more interesting, people would sneak in every night and move all of the fun house mirrors, change the strength of the glasses to a stronger, more incorrect level and increase the density of the steam or smoke. That is how my life has progressed over the passed twenty five years since my first diagnosis of glaucoma.

In a world of humans with eyes, there are generally two states: the vast majority who can see and those who can't. Everything in-between is poorly understood, and in the case of pigment dispersion glaucoma, it is always changing for the worse. There is no point that you reach where you can say, "That is it. That is how I see with pigment dispersion glaucoma." Each day turns off another pixel in the screen of my life. Each day turns off another light bulb. Each day introduces a new set of optical illusions and a new level of cognitive confusion. But people, the culture at large, potential employers and health insurance organizations want to have a number that will tell them definitively what my vision is. Is it 20/30, 20/70, 20/200? They don't want to hear "It depends...".

No one wants to hear about visual field range, low contrast resolution, distortion, low light blindness, glare effects, low acuity and the loss of stereoscopic vision. To move into a discussion of visual cognition is even less appealing, but these are the elements of vision that we all experience from the moment our eyes opened outside of the womb. They define the way we perceive the world, the way we relate to the world and all creatures within it. They also provide the foundation for how we communicate with each other, which is predominantly visual. Fortunately for most, this is a seamless and "invisible" process. We don't know it happens. It just seems to work "out of the box".

When we walk into a room, or any space for that matter, there is a symphony of reflected light that is gathered up and passed back into the brain for analysis. The "gathering up" is accomplished by the eyes. This is vision. The "analysis" is done by the brain. This is cognition. The result of visual cognition is an "image", which is one aspect of perception. This "image" is made up of millions of components that represent everything from color to dimension, distance, direction, orientation, shadows, movement, luminosity, patterns and many other elements in a scene that surrounds us. This "image" is the fodder for memories, associations, recognition, emotion, knowledge and other factors that have an impact on how we feel, how we act and how we think. All of this occurs before we have any awareness of where we are and what is happening.

We like to think that this happens instantaneously. In reality, we depend upon it happening almost instantaneously because, in some sense, nothing happens until we "perceive" it and perception is the result of this gathering and analysis that is accomplished by the eye and brain working together. If it didn't happen we would never know we are in danger. We would never recognize other people. We would never be able to navigate through the world or learn anything. A similar cognitive process happens with our other senses of touch, smell, taste and hearing, but with much less data to work on and much less complexity.

If we had to think about the vision machine in order to use it, it would never be useful to us. Imagine if we had to consciously turn our eyes on and explicitly choose what data to gather, what to send back to the brain and which data are to be analyzed and in what way. It would take seconds, if not minutes to even know that we were in the room and even longer to figure out what else was in the room, including friends, relatives or lions and tigers.

With total blindness, there is no visual information arriving in the brain. Even if the eyes are perfectly, physically functional, if the information from the gathered light does not make it to the brain nothing is "seen". This is when the brain has to use the other senses of touch, hearing, tasting and smelling, but all of these senses together do not bring even a sliver of the information that vision provides. There is a reason for all of those expressions that indicate ignorance ("I just can't see it"), denial ("I turned a blind eye towards it"), risk ("I just jumped in, totally blind to the consequences", "a blind date"), deceit ("a duck blind", "blind sided") and other types of behavior.

But, at least with total blindness, the brain knows that there is no visual information and doesn't try to "see". With vision, even if it is deeply compromised, the brain will defer to vision first and foremost and it will try to figure out what the eyes are "seeing" before anything else is done with the other senses and it will believe what it "sees" even if it is incorrect, because the brain will fill in the blanks left by the eyes with what it (the brain) believes should be there, even if it wasn't really there. At the same time, it will not believe that something is there if it can't "see" it.

This is particularly true if a person had "normal" vision from birth and then experienced a degradation of the vision later in life. In my case, I had thirty five years of uninterrupted binocular vision with a full visual field range, full color, good high contrast resolution, no distortion and many of the other elements of what would be called "normal" vision. My brain developed with that "normal" vision profile, which allowed me to live a reasonably "normal" life. For most people, this is a "normal" experience, since "normal" vision has been fully established by the time they are three years old. After that, it is all a matter of gathering and learning.

So what does the brain do when the data coming in from the eyes is no longer valid? If everyone around you starts to lie to you all of the time, what happens to your perception of the world. What do you do when you have no confidence in anything said to you? With pigment dispersion glaucoma, the optical nerves die randomly over time as a result of the sustained, elevated ocular pressure. As the optical nerves die, the information the brain is depending on to "see", "perceive", "analyze" and "survive" is becoming less dependable. In other words, the eyes are lying with increasing voracity, continuously.

If I can't, with confidence, understand what I am "seeing", how can I communicate to others what I am "seeing"? This has become the ultimate challenge. I have two eyes, although my left eye only exhibits a sliver of peripheral vision and my right eye has a vision that is affected by a variety of factors that limit its ability to gather enough accurate, reflected light to send back into the brain for effective analysis. But to others, my eyes look normal. My "blind" left eye tracks with my right as it has for the past sixty years. I am mobile. I have no difficulty moving as I have throughout my life, although I am slower at sixty than I was at twenty. I can physically do everything a "normal" person can do. So it looks odd to others when they "see" me use a walking stick with reflective tape to help me "see" and help me avoid falling if I run into something I don't "see".

The visual cognition part of my brain does not know that my eyes are lying to it. It really believes everything that is coming back from the eyes is complete and accurate. There is no way for the brain to know otherwise. It will do everything necessary to ensure that the image created internally is "complete" for the sake of "memory" and analysis. So, if my walking stick stops in mid-air when the tip hits the edge of a retaining wall that the eyes and brain didn't "see", my brain wants to believe that the stick is stuck in the air. It doesn't believe what it can't "see", so the retaining wall does not exist. If my leg hits the "unseen" retaining wall, bruising my shin, my sense of touch will send a somewhat urgent message to the brain saying that there is a hard object in the path and that the shin is injured. The brain, wanting to believe the eyes, will take a second look with the eyes, which may very well still not "see" the wall. Now the brain has to mediate between the eyes and the leg and respond with a counter action. Often I will close my eyes just to force my brain to use my sense of touch and bypass the superior clout of visual cognition. This disconnect between my visual cognition and the rest of my senses, and the ensuing effort to resolve the conflict can take time result in catastrophe if there is the possibility of falling into a pit or stepping in front of a car.

It is not as though I woke up one day and realized that I could not see. That would be blindness: no light; no purpose for windows, street signs or television; no context for most of what we normally "perceive" as beauty. That would allow me to say that I am blind. That would allow me to say something the world understands: that I am handicapped and need assistance crossing the street, reading a book or shopping for groceries.

I've seen the small bumps arranged in patterns on elevators, office doors and public telephone keypads, but there is a sea of three dimensional reality that gives no clue to its existence until it is tasted, touched, heard or smelled. Vision is the glue that ties it all together within our brains. Without it, the world is a labyrinth filled with obstacles and no map. It cannot be studied, only experienced. Every wall must be felt. Every flower pot must be tripped over or bumped into. Every low-hanging tree branch must be grappled with as it tugs at clothes, tangles with hair and gouges the skin. City streets are savage rivers teeming with metallic piranhas eager to devour the visually clueless racing for the curb. I feel myself slipping into the murky currents of this haze that swirls around me. I am unnerved when I see my fingertips disappear while cutting carrots or onions. I shudder when I step into a room and ask the group of people standing nearby if they have seen my wife, then one of the people in that group steps towards me and says, "I'm here." I marvel when I am talking to someone and their head suddenly fuses into the brick wall in the background, leaving a body with no head.

The lines of text that form on the screen as I type them are both out of focus in the midst of a glaring backlit screen and unfolding in distorted waves. If I place a strait ruler along the line, it too will rise and fall in sync with the letters. There is no "true"-ness in the contours of my life. Everything stretches, weaves, disappears and rises up from the obscurity like a goldfish floating to the surface of a pond obscured by moss and algae.

I am no longer in the land of the sighted. I am not yet in the land of the blind. I am in the land of smoke and mirrors. I am going blind.