This is called "In the Antipodes,"
which it came into the poem.
But I had to look it up.
And it means opposite your feet.
If you go all the way down to the other end
of the Earth, the other side of the Earth,
that's where you'll find the antipodes.
Have I got it right?
Does anybody know?
Have I got in right, Finn?
All right, many of us are language people.
And words will just come.
And then you better check.
I always have to check to make sure when they're unusual.
I did have it pronounced wrong.
I thought it was the antipodes.
This is a poem about a fairly kind of fresh subject.
Because there was an article about this man
the poem is about--
by Oliver Sacks and the New Yorker not long ago.
But I had known about this man's story for a number of years.
He had been a musician and composer in England.
And he had some kind of brain disease and lost almost all
of his short term memory.
They said he had a memory as short as a blink.
And I wrote the poem from reading the article.
But I had met his wife about a dozen years ago
and had heard the story from her.
So it resonated with me.
"In the Antipodes"--
"The man with a memory as short as a blink
comes to consciousness.
I was dead, now I am alive.
He writes this in his diary for 30 days,
then grasps the nature of the thing, and quits.
Because beyond that, all narrative is thwarted.
Before he can begin the hard work of beginning again--"
I stole that line from somebody.
There she is right there.
A thwarted narrative-- didn't you say that?
She gave a talk to my class, and I love that.
It was called a thwarted narrative.
I really did take it from her.
"He quits writing in his diary.
Because beyond that, all narrative is thwarted.
Before he can begin the hard work of beginning again,
he blinks.
For us, onsets are endless and promising--
the child on his first bike, the climber
at the base of the mountain looking up.
But his childhood got lost and did not return.
And Tibet is a mountain in his calendar
where the page never turns.
This is an actual man, a genius once.
His lovely and loving wife visits every day.
The door opens, and the only person he can recognize,
he weeps.
They embrace.
He hasn't seen her in God knows how long.
Such love lies deep in the brain.
And if the heart had a brain, there we
would find it, beating its plain, sustainable song.
For love, he plays the piano, he sings as he once did,
and quite famously, in churches and concert halls.
And
Music being flow-- and flow for artists
being the great transcender of time and place and self itself.
He keeps on playing in the continuous present
of the amnesia--
plays what he knew and still knows.
That's practice, and is lodged in the brain's lower regions
that bid the animal to wake, get dressed, handily knot his tie.
But here, here is the quirk in the wiring,
the God in the machine.
What he doesn't know, he makes up.
He composes.
And that, like love, is beyond anatomy, at least so far.
The neurologist can only say such beauty
comes from God knows where.
I'd like to make a big deal out of that,
to keep that mystery in the Witness Protection Program.
And I'd like it to give him solace.
But compared with what is missing, it's only cruel.
I was asleep, now I'm awake.
Poor man can't even carry on an extended conversation
with himself.
I'd like to think his original compositions are
born and nursed in the antipodes between himself
and himself, in the crevasse, where
the small talk of the brain's small heart
starts up and takes its portions of joy,
then returns it to the air--
no one present to witness it-- not his wife, not
the good doctor, not himself.