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When I hear 'occult,' I think 'inaccessible to diagnosis.' Some months ago, with no
forewarnings and from no discernible source, blood spilled into my lungs so that I
had to cough it up, spit it out: pure fresh red spattering the white sink. This
happened four times in all. A few days in hospital, many tests, and one exploratory
surgery later, no diagnosis was reached. My condition had an occult pathology. I
was told that "sometimes these things just happen and we never know why," but I
knew otherwise; I knew it was a practice-run at accepting, even tending, the gift of
death—of all deaths, but my own in particular–which I am wont to regard with
resentment, bewilderment, dread, and with much interest.

' ' '

What's occulted is hidden, obscured from view or from the reassurances of coherent
explanation. I experience my writerly words arising from and partaking of such
hiddenness, and I hope to reproduce it in some measure for a reader or listener:
weird but half-recognizable speech-acts insinuating secret joys and sorrows, secret
truths. I wish this mission upon my words because I do not believe in the
attenuated Enlightenment dream of Scientistic and Technological Progress, the
august and brutal lie of Health-unto-death, which opiates the body and the mind and
the spirit.

I vote for chance and feeling and epiphany, for the unnatural and the supernatural
as natural, for facts as fables. I vote against Positivism and all its tawdry
manifestations of so-called knowledge.

' ' '

The lines I write or speak, the carved-and-stacked versal tokens, are the bloody
symptom (sputum: anything coughed up) and they are also the giddy, earnest spell
cast against it. Manifesting symptoms not as proof of but as proof against
something. There are no tests to run, and there is no diagnosis for whatever
condition. I aspire to pathology in an older sense–thoughts on and of affliction.
Say psalm-like pathology, and for that, read actual prayer-songs of exultation, eros,
bitter anger, and grievance.

' ' '

Before and as I write, I often practice asceticisms: fast, deprive my senses, wait,
gently inflict small pains on the surface of my skin, and/or adhere to invented
textual strictures. By these behaviors I hope to precipitate swerves out of routine
and practicality, impertinent verbal dishevelments: violent acts-of-love, compelling
balletic pratfalls. I have trouble writing. Trying to say something is agonizing and
clumsy. Poetry is a tricky half-escape from that and also a record of it.

' ' '

Groundglass opacity : the technical term used to report an anomalous haziness
revealed in a soft-tissue scan of my lungs, and now, for me, a talisman to carry
around for what lifetime remains.

' ' '

Ritual: notice thought-like agitations prompted by some incidental thing or
occurrence. Perhaps jot down or murmur words or phrases that come to mind. Then
later, when your beloved is asleep nearby and your home is dark and quiet, begin to
proliferate, smelt, anneal, and generally transmute the initial agitations into
utterances that consist in creature-like words and erratic but pronounced rhythms.
If the resulting twisted lines are divinatory, it is not because they are in search of
fortunes or futures, but because they are merely fumbling for pleasures and spells
that'll work just in a given moment, stuff persons can trip on, real efforts at repelling
disease, death, acedia and other evils.

' ' '

A 3 year-old's findings upon recently investigating my face: a bug in my ear, a snail
in my nose, an alligator in my mouth, & a mouth in my eye. What I write is perhaps
what dribbles from the mouth in my eye—both suppuration and (may it be so)
salve.





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