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This is a poem called "Lepra."
It starts with another epigraph, and this one is
from a book called "Jesus, a Revolutionary Biography"
by the controversial early Christian,
a scholar of early Christianity, John Dominic Crossan.
"The leprous person is not a social threat because of medical
contagion, threatening infection or epidemic,
as we might imagine, but because of symbolic contamination.
Threatening in microcosm the very identity, integrity,
and security of society at large.
Your rash is theological.
A havoc, a ravage, a scaph, mephitic alloy,
zymotic azoth, something alive, thus imperfect.
Do you love me, Peter?
Agape diluted into philo, so the psyche can apprehend it.
Is devotion a blemish?
Humors are juice, not excrement, a fluent part of the body
comprehended in it.
Unpurged ghosts daffidate the rescue of souls by God,
by loving women and men.
(unclear dialogue).
Leprosy is the soul in acathartic suspension,
your skin blistering with lesions, legion.
Separations yellow and daylight.
Cicatrization is flesh-darning in loving kindless.
I would lick your wounds until they sweetened sufficiently
to tolerate interrogation, its supine attendences.
Do you love me?
I'm listening.
Your recovery from this damage depends on this question.
Let me touch these exulcerations analogous to the thought
necrosis of your melancholy.
Let me mesh with you into an intersubjective
epic of connection.
Dream, my care is an analeptic lenitive, a loving prescription,
a list of useful books.
Healing is doctoring only in its glorification
of the mind embodied.
Life nosopneumonic to uneasiness expresses a cylix of dread
in the gut, a leukocytic syrup gagged forth in fits
or diffused in a gas of mystery.
You can only live in a cemetary out of fear of contact,
which is need of contact.
I don't even need to touch you to cure you.
To be clean, take this love a whop at your feet, touch it,
and with it, be touched."
I've always found that really fascinating, this notion that
leprosy which is one of the diseases that shows up in the
New Testament has this modern analogue, you know.
We think of it as leprosy, which is Hansen's disease,
which comes from a bacteria.
You know, it's totally contagious and that's why
*** colonies were created, but leprosy as it appears in
the New Testament, this word lepra had to do with
really bad rashes, really bad skin problems,
usually because people weren't clean enough, you know?
Like if you don't wash regularly, you're going to get,
your skin's going to get kind of nasty, and one of the things
about Jewish law was that you couldn't be oozing fluid
and go into the temple to perform sacrifices,
you had to be clean, you know?
This is why all the menstrual proscriptions arose,
which you know, you just have to read Leviticus, et cetera,
to glory in those.
But it's an interesting thing that it shifted over into the
New Testament in the terms of the way Christ, the story of
Christ is told, but from these four different writer's
perspectives and each of them is interested in, you know,
you can organize Christ's miracles into two basic groups.
Commensal eating--that is, he would eat with people
he wasn't supposed to, or touching-- he would touch
people he wasn't supposed to, or people would touch him.
So that's the sort of, that seems in itself an interesting
way to start thinking about what a miracle is.
Having to do with receptivity, having to do with contact,
something like that.
I'm going to read for you now some selections from this,
the poem that I'm working on right now.
This is a long poem called the "Phosphorescence of Thought."
Sometimes the poetry reading can be this thing where the poet
reads and everybody's expected to understand what he's
talking about, and then the way typically that this is mediated
in an event like this is, I'm supposed to be kind of ironic.
And that's supposed to put you at ease in some way, but,
you know, there's a lot of stuff that goes into writing a poem,
some of which I am aware of, and some of which I am not.
It's kind of ridiculous for me to expect you to have any idea,
at any point, what I'm talking about.
So then that puts me in the position of explaining some
things, and it's hard not to sound kind of pedantic in that
situation, so I've been experimenting with this
and I've been trying to find a kind of middle way, I guess.
How to explain certain things without going into a lecture,
and also, how to just read things and allow you to
hopefully appreciate them for what's there.
So I'll give you just a couple of little bits of information.
And I give these to you because, you know, this is my,
this is sort of my investment in this material kind of
arises from these things.
The title comes from a phrase that appears in the works of the
Jesuit palaeontologist, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.
That's kind of a strange label, Jesuit palaeontologist.
He was a controversial figure when he was,
shortly after he died.
While he was alive, nobody really knew about him because
he took his vow of obedience to the Society of Jesus very
seriously, and the authorities in the Societies of Jesus would
not allow him to publish his controversial,
theological writings.
His scientific writings were published widely,
he wrote a lot of papers.
He's famous for discovering the Peking Man,
which at the time was the oldest complete humanoid skeleton,
I think it was 300,000 years old or so.
He spent most of his adult life living in China or the Gobi
desert, often alone or with a few other Mongolian yak herders
or something like that.
In his, probably his most important book is a thing
called "The Phenomenon of Man".
That's usually how it's translated into English,
but could just as easily be "The Human Phenomenon."
And he had this idea that as humans were evolving through
time, God was also evolving, and this co-evolution was going to
lead toward this Omega Point.
That's the name he gave to it, in which he believed at that
moment, humans and God would be completely identical.
The whole universe would become Christ.
He was, afterall, Catholic.
But he also was a guy who was positing the very first genuine
theories of evolution in a Christian theological sense,
not feeling that there was an antagonism.