WEBVTT

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This is called "In
the Antipodes,"

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which it came into the poem.

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But I had to look it up.

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And it means opposite your feet.

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If you go all the way
down to the other end

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of the Earth, the other
side of the Earth,

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that's where you'll
find the antipodes.

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Have I got it right?

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Does anybody know?

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Have I got in right, Finn?

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All right, many of us
are language people.

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And words will just come.

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And then you better check.

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I always have to check to make
sure when they're unusual.

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I did have it pronounced wrong.

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I thought it was the antipodes.

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This is a poem about a
fairly kind of fresh subject.

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Because there was an
article about this man

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the poem is about--

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by Oliver Sacks and the
New Yorker not long ago.

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But I had known about this man's
story for a number of years.

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He had been a musician
and composer in England.

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And he had some kind of brain
disease and lost almost all

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of his short term memory.

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They said he had a memory
as short as a blink.

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And I wrote the poem
from reading the article.

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But I had met his wife
about a dozen years ago

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and had heard the
story from her.

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So it resonated with me.

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"In the Antipodes"--

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"The man with a memory
as short as a blink

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comes to consciousness.

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I was dead, now I am alive.

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He writes this in his
diary for 30 days,

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then grasps the nature
of the thing, and quits.

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Because beyond that, all
narrative is thwarted.

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Before he can begin the hard
work of beginning again--"

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I stole that line from somebody.

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There she is right there.

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A thwarted narrative--
didn't you say that?

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She gave a talk to my
class, and I love that.

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It was called a
thwarted narrative.

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I really did take it from her.

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"He quits writing in his diary.

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Because beyond that, all
narrative is thwarted.

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Before he can begin the hard
work of beginning again,

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he blinks.

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For us, onsets are
endless and promising--

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the child on his first
bike, the climber

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at the base of the
mountain looking up.

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But his childhood got
lost and did not return.

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And Tibet is a mountain
in his calendar

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where the page never turns.

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This is an actual
man, a genius once.

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His lovely and loving
wife visits every day.

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The door opens, and the only
person he can recognize,

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he weeps.

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They embrace.

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He hasn't seen her in
God knows how long.

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Such love lies
deep in the brain.

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And if the heart had
a brain, there we

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would find it, beating its
plain, sustainable song.

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For love, he plays the piano,
he sings as he once did,

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and quite famously, in
churches and concert halls.

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And

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Music being flow--
and flow for artists

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being the great transcender of
time and place and self itself.

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He keeps on playing in
the continuous present

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of the amnesia--

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plays what he knew
and still knows.

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That's practice, and is lodged
in the brain's lower regions

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that bid the animal to wake, get
dressed, handily knot his tie.

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But here, here is the
quirk in the wiring,

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the God in the machine.

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What he doesn't
know, he makes up.

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He composes.

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And that, like love, is beyond
anatomy, at least so far.

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The neurologist can
only say such beauty

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comes from God knows where.

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I'd like to make a
big deal out of that,

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to keep that mystery in the
Witness Protection Program.

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And I'd like it to
give him solace.

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But compared with what is
missing, it's only cruel.

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I was asleep, now I'm awake.

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Poor man can't even carry
on an extended conversation

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with himself.

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I'd like to think his
original compositions are

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born and nursed in the
antipodes between himself

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and himself, in
the crevasse, where

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the small talk of the
brain's small heart

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starts up and takes
its portions of joy,

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then returns it to the air--

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no one present to witness
it-- not his wife, not

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the good doctor, not himself.

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