Auguries of Insanity (1990)

This is just a note to tell you that I pray every night, indeed sometimes all night long. I do it because I'm grateful to God. Perhaps it's too narrow to limit it to just three occasions, but there have been at least three times in my life when I was directly affected by God's influence. =============== One time was when I suffered a traumatic brain injury in a car accident in 1991 which changed the course of my life permanently. A second time was when the Holy Spirit descended upon me when I was working on a book called Postmodern Christianity at Bard College in 1995. But perhaps the most incontrovertible demonstration of "proof" was when I asked for and received, only a short time later, a woman with the surname Zimmerman, which was in 2005. I have experienced other such phenomena in my life, but these are the three that I cannot reason away. I don't know the cause of these happenings, but I know that they pretty much came to an end when Dr. Marc Tarle of New City, NY started me on Risperidone in 2006. =============== Looking back, I realize that there are several other times when I had profound metaphysical experiences. When I was nineteen years old, in the summer between my final year of high school and my first year of college, I wrote a number of poems one night, in fact it was an entire book of poetry that came to me spontaneously, as if I was the mouthpiece of some spirit of other being. I regret that I did not share this poetry with John Ashbery when I had the chance; I imagine it would have interested him greatly, as it was more or less of a sort of non-organized structure and was less meaning-specific that the poetry I wrote for his poetry workshop that I took with him in 1994 or 1995. This group of texts amounted to about thirty pages and included some extra-textual material, such as a flag-shaped parallelogram and a red dot in the poem called "Japan's Flag" which, I did however submit to Dan Masterson's poetry workshop in 1991 at Rockland Community College--but this series of compositions remained without a title, until I remembered something that happened to me, perhaps before high school: I was writing in a small black notebook when my hand WROTE, without my own volition, the title "Auguries of Insanity." I realize now, after having destroyed these writings in 2006, that this was the true title of this work. Perhaps it would have caused my name to be linked with that of Arthur Rimbaud, I can only wonder what would have been the significance or at least the end results of this disturbing text imbued with the vomit of my unconscious mind. =============== Another metaphysical experience was when I read an article from The New York Times article concerning Dr. Atkins, whose dietary prescriptions were making news in the early Nineties. I read the article and fell in love with his personal assistant, Annie Armstrong, who was also mentioned in the article but who I was not to meet until 2003. =============== When choosing whether or not to believe in the veracity of my account in this brief note, you should take into consideration that people in my circumstances frequently claim that they have "seen" God, or even that they are Jesus Christ himself. While I do not hold any such opinions, neither do I believe my friend Miroslav Kocic, who suggesting that God was toying with me and laughing at me maliciously. I believe God loves me, as I believe in a world yet to come....