LITMIR.BIZ

      When I close my eyes in the courtyard between the Rotary Centre and the city art gallery, the sky is a dull solution of silver bromide. As I walk with my eyes closed, the day appears to brighten and brighten through my eyelids.

      What we see as light and colour is the expression of several relationships: photons from the sun with the reflective surfaces of our environments, with the rods and cones of our eyes, with the neuropathways in our brain.

      I read about these relationships in a book on the discoveries of cognitive science and their implications for philosophical traditions.

      The book was written by a famous cognitive scientist from the United States and a philosopher with whom I once spoke when I was in graduate school ten years earlier. We were standing before our respective urinals, legs braced in that way that betrays a particular concentration. I mentioned John Dewey’s aesthetic theory. He nodded.

      Another word for this kind of phenomenon is coincidence. From coincidence might come something new: colour for example, or this anecdote. Brought together, the elements do what? Collaborate?

      At first my hand is on the shoulder of a young Iranian-Canadian sculptor with a rare blood disorder. He’s several inches taller than me, 6′2″ maybe, thin but broad shouldered.

      Recently, he’d installed a series of geometric shapes on my living room wall. The shapes are made of translucent, pastel-coloured bendy straws and translucent scotch tape. Affixed with Velcro, the straws appear to be growing like crystals from the white paint and drywall.

      While he mounted the sculpture, we talked about the maintenance of his blood and the limitations it put on travel, how his blood is always a factor.

      As we walk he drinks coffee with one hand, eyes closed, his other hand on my shoulder.¹⁸

      By 1654, John Milton was completely blind. He titled his most famous poem of that period, “When I Consider How My Light is Spent”—a delightfully multivalent phrase that turns on both the light that vision afforded him and its diminishment, as well as the metaphor of his life and life’s work being kinds of light.

      A later editor retitled the sonnet, “On His Blindness.”

      By 1977, Ronald Johnson had completed a deep erasure of Milton’s masterpiece, Paradise Lost, which he published as Radi os.

      The term “radio” comes from the combining form of the Latin noun “radius,” meaning ray or beam. Such as a ray of light. A sunbeam.

       There’s this thing I like to do. Just to get a sense of who is here. We close our eyes and then we say our names. I say my name and then you each say your name. If you think you’re the last person you’re probably not. We’ll get through this quickly.

       I’m closing my eyes, I promise.

       My eyes are closed.

      Ronald Johnson’s book of erasure poetry—in which new poems are discovered¹⁹ in existing texts by cutting away most of the original text—has four customer reviews on Amazon and a 100 percent, five-star rating.

      A cookbook, The American Table, also attributed to Ronald Johnson, is a collaboration with illustrator James McGarrell; it has ten customer reviews and an identical 100 percent, five-star rating.²⁰

      As if in anticipation of this confluence of poetry and meals, the final line of “When I Consider How My Light is Spent” reads, “they also serve who only stand and wait.”

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