Nelson Gary: California Poets Part 7, Five Poems

Nelson Gary

July 1st, 2024

California Poets: Part VII

Nelson Gary

Five Poems

My Co’& Clonazepam

In explosions secreting seconds

Without them screaming to be

Measured by this mangy monkey

With manicured nails, Simian Simon

Says, who plays marbles with relative

            moments,

I found a way to be intimate

Without my co’, but freedom faded fast.

I definitely did not dig the surge

Of the randomness, maybe only

The unexpected, but, at any rate,

Inconsistency kept being accountable

Impossible. 

The bleeding fog rolled in,

A decapitation from the inside out;

Wrinkles went to waves, weathering walls of hospital.

Yet there’s excitement to blitz

Beyond boundaries, calamitous or fortunate.

Chaos reigned supreme when comfort

Was exposed as quicksand sculpture.

The embrace of sacred stability didn’t

Last eons, the grim panel of elders;

Pocket change in recycled trousers,

Alchemy of ephemera, the dollar, my co’s

Cut, from the Emerald Tablet, as we

Made the commitment to build the habit.

Hazy Uncle told my co’, who’d ripped

Out some bird’s guts—saving the brain

Clawed from skull for sun’s starving

Rays—that Bukowski blew off writing

For a decade because it got in the way

Of his drinking: mostly beer.

The track, broken leg. 

A bomb & firearm fast, Bible belt, I added

A hole with a butterfly knife bought black

Market, pierced fauna as profound as a Gospel,

Punched it in the Tenderloin, a slow poke,

Stamina, teasing, then taming the tantalization

To that timeless satiation.  This mercy killing

Cranked out quality consistency, thoughtless

Revelation until the hampered heartbeat

Hammered this newfound passion

Wit’ purpose, its hardness, indeed,

 Hard to imagine,

Found only in the Zen rock garden my co’

And I made disappear!  Clockwork anatomies,

Time bombs in a town of tics.  In profundity’s

Bargain paradise, my co’ fixed the picture;

Then I creamed not conscious experience

Unprotected

                    but split-second perspicacity,

Fractions in metered, muscular flux structured

By precision, sufficient to sneak by undetected when

Cops came to claim that we’d replaced the bathtub

Plug with a drum owned by a hunter down for a rub.

Second time, numbed and drained, our dictionaries

Torched, flickers in cinders of recapitulation, I

            now

Keep my co’s soft, full lips busy, because beauty

For me is kicking Klonopin; a Benz I don’t

Want anyone to buy me, a suicide squadron

Bettered by Captain Jack, who seethes with each breath

Of dearly departed Gitanes, smoke spiraling in Palace Piaf.

This is a fetishistic flash of famous nervous

Systems, veins of Gaia in leaves, auguries in tea,

Strong, hot.  Evidently, there are pin numbers for clones

Bequeathed to my sleepless savagery.  I’m gone in grand

Style—smashing!—as a clod to velvet Prague after my people book

The best suite available for my co’ and me in the Golem Inn.

I need security in duplication, indestructible

Proliferation—yessir!  Now, there can be order

From the pack’s rat, also the hoarder, to the broke

And alone, shadowy boarder, but for my co’

Come the piranhas in body fluids, metabolizing nerves.

They’re not buried all that deeply beneath the skin,

Though they bite close to the bone, as closets

Of conformists cliché their tightly knit, clandestine location.

It’s a kick that comes close to alcohol withdrawal

            for wet brains.  There

Really should be dummies devised with intricacy

That fluctuates spontaneously, naturally

Within the parameters of unbroken consistency.

All the rituals rooted in ruin, thick cosmetics

            wet—redemption, my sin.

This is definitely when Captain Jack must assume

The role of seaman, give the winged monkey organs to grind

Because amidst the misty fog—all along—it was the sinister

Plot called intervention . . . orchestrated and engineered

            by my repentant, reformed co’.

The Drunken Boat’s Metabolism

I.

Giant gurney of guts, glory storied, you

Were an easy mark for the wrong birds

Peckish in Piazza San Marco, not pigeons,

But Brazilian buzzards: psychopaths, lads

From a distant land, Copacabana chupacabras,

Their features, those of Sea-Monkeys, for which

They’d ventured to Venice to earn extra

Clams for many surgeries (modifications),

Hooligans who’d worked beaches, abducting others

To make them viscera donors for 24-7 hospital-casino

Slashers to eviscerate for more and less than signs

Of existence recycled.  Failed once to save you

More than the sight of this beef rolled

Into billiards balls and stuffed into tubes to make cues;

You, fashion plate, framed for breakfast eggs

Benedict epiphanies, pancakes with sides of sausage,

Some twisted, tied off with twine to make links,

The flavor, the scent of anise, naked lunch meatballs,

Tomato juice, blue nude specials complete, traditional

With three vegetables; scraps of hot cross buns,

Sweet, fresh cakes fed to pigeons shitty to the bronze lion.

Failed as your redeemer, global village bicycle

            of the roundabout

Wheel of life, of fortune titanic, zoetrope,

The whole zoo, a massive windup on the restricting

Leash of intestines linked as the Great Chain of Being

Wrapped around Father Time’s diamond cutter—a cock

            ring.

Planetary Burmese bells for balls chimed with the soul

Of the Bow Bells tolled, teasing my backyard’s hole.

He did please all my faerie nymphs and this dodo—diddled

Deliriously in sacrifice to save our Domesday Book

From getting cooked by wrong chefs in this donnybrook.

First and foremost, I hooked to get you off the bloody hook.

II.

For their collective betrayal, I’ll burn down every

Bloody city until they keep our lot’s living quarters pretty,

Save Venice already sinking.  It can drown

Tomorrow in my Chinese water torture of tears

If tomorrow returns to me this sorrow aged years.

The world works against me, and I pull, with migraines,

For the Earth, its minerals and plants and things.

It’s not impatience but sound mind that prevents

Me from repeating the same error twice.  Merchants

Of not only sacred meat, I can’t trust ever again. 

Ye, man, ya!

Starving, I saw your ship sail out, judgment

Against you.  Addictus!  Your debt to be paid

To all unborn, all living, all dead burned and laid.

Woe! my reputation ruined to regain your freedom,

Which was not restored as promised for prostitution.

But love, hope, and desire remain unhindered

Through taking refuge in your sea song remembered.

This very Last Princess knows more than your kiss,

Which contains Earth, world, Heaven, and Hell as bliss.

Holism is my timeless taste, even with its abyss.

III.

Perfectly silent, still now on the raft of Medusa, whom

I had to swallow as a bitter pill, hence headstones,

My passion for you is almost as mercurial as Claudel’s.

It’s the rational twist of an internal tempest I possess

And gracefully explicate to find myself damned

And blessed, not the least bit, no, not at all depressed.

Though I’m not where I belong, I’m with whom

I have rest.

Even premium, choice salvation has its twists.

Tolerantly, I know this, my fingers curling into fists.

When do these thugs leave me alone (hence less tense)

To accomplish what they cannot do in recompense?

“Good Lord!” the master shouts.  “He was not kidding,

The young buck, but, indeed, quite serious in his defiance.

‘This is the pimp line, for I have been sold inside and out,

As if no more than a drunken, nameless lout,’ he said. 

Get his heart to break, so that he cometh

Down mad and with great wrath to remove him from this

White throne of judgment, his and that of mead, his bliss.”

The proverbial tables turn when I

Attack the ship with a jolly boat-shaped grin And declare, “Addictus!” as judgment

Against these faceless, ruling imperialists

In downsized drag, decked-outsourced

For the globalization masquerade ball, exploiters

Of poor workers and loose labor and environmental laws:

Marauders, slaveholders—at bottom, fear−control junkies

With debts to be paid for crimes against humanity

And the Earth.  Their chaos, our liberation in turning them over

To themselves to seek their own salvation.  Their vessel docked,

Just another worthy urn for Lady Fortune—not shocked

By the decree’s result as karma.  A thousand, similar ships

Were once launched in commitment to this morning star magus.

IV.

It’s a sudden lock, deadbolt,

Your body enfolded by mine,

The aftermath of yours unfolding, such is

Vision and breath to the rhythm of maithuna:

Again and again, unfolding the splendor

And glory of you, my twin, your sweet maple

Bar and doughnut holes.  How can such a thing be? 

It’s a mystery revealed in stages and cannibalized by curiosity. 

“No fair,” they say, and, of course, that means no foul.

V.

In this midsummer evening’s green room,

The kilim rug unrolled, the mint tea sweet sipped

From skull cups.  Leaves are angel wings soaked

For one green world after another to be coaxed

Into fitting on stages.  Lampshade of goat hide screens

Saharan sun to softness.  Beyond demonology scenes,

Beyond genii granting the wishes of human beings,

You hold me more than meaning, opening later this evening.

A genie’s only wish is for another genie as a lover.

Beyond the jitters, we transform as twins together.

It doesn’t much matter how our passion does burn,

Even if it leaves us as ashes in an emerald urn.

Jar

The visions pour,

                            but

                                 there are

                                               no more

                                                            revelations

From these

                 that are core

                                     to the closing

                                                          of transmission.

Inventions are envisioned

                                         in the pluck pretty

                                                                      pasture

Where rests

                   an alabaster

                                      jar. 

                   The healing is future

Kneeling

To this presence perfect in motion

Outside

And inside

Me

With the dives

                       I have

Taken

         for the talk

                          of the block

                                             that prevents hints

From being

Noticed

In the saddled grief

Gone

Along

The strong pharmacy

Beaten

To pulses from bodies

Saved

From the grave.

In the sepulcher story of glory,

The glare of the light frightens those uptight

In a flurry

For this hurry to hustle

                                     the heaven

                                                      known

                                                                 by leaf

And stone.

I own

         the lonesome

                              relief

                                      in the beliefs

Of the burned in the urn,

                                        jar,

                                              turned toward

                                                                            taught

Lessons lived

                      in the love

                                      of the dove’s

                                                           descent

                                caught

To capture these colors

                                reflected

                     for the numbers gathered.

I have collected wages

                                    from the sages

                                                           who still

                                                                         matter

As the rain

                  patters on

                                  this spatter:

                         the bloody door of sunset.

I was a bullet train of thought

                                       shot

                                 @ this blank

                                state of the wet

Where I am now

                          rendered newer

                            than the blue

                              from which

Forever appears

                    the news nightly that does

                                   jar

                                 more

                              than a few.

Lady Inside

Jarred by the ignorance of graceful gestures,

I recover in equal time to express the stifling,

Old (ghosted) moves of etiquette, then I acquit

All consciousness before its quiet—if not, silent—

            consignment to the nondual supernatural. 

Through potent magic improvised, mixing original

And ancient rituals, instinctual and ancestral,

            in the moody moment, I quit

My compulsion for questions and answers, release

Myself of judgment for being so fiery in spirit.

The night’s murky haze shadows my complexion

And the depth of all that leads to some sort

Of gilded craft; my cradle, at last, will it be.

Ancient souls, such as mine, are or once were

Munificent with noble carriage in waiting flesh—or

Deportment, demeanor . . . to be more current.

Having seen too much death to be anything

But decadent, you’ll have to forgive me

I have yet another caller here for my wise brain

To gnaw, and you can trust my words will stick

With him where you are with the bone I threw you.

You look so eager, spirited, dolled up in baby blue.

Bowed from the neck, not the waist—good boy,

He is—his protocol pretty close to perfect.  Perhaps,

I fancy him more, however, for his charming, folksy

Lack of refined manners.  Even still, I detest his swagger

And imbecilic presumptuousness under my banner.

I wonder if my demanding, seasoned guidance

Would meet

With greenhorn,

Backwater

Recalcitrance.

I’m really neither up to snuff nor ardently desirous

Of entertaining another energetic chump, chatting up

Such a chap.  Marvel no more, lovers are just tea leaves

In my skull cup, good finds in these visions’ debris.

Heart of a victim, mind of a killer, spirit of a healer.

Of the human race, who’s to judge or play the squealer?

Noire Creator of the Cosmic Pulp Ache

Cleverly, I do everything just askew,

So there are fate and chance to view

Free will as it sparks the timeless void

With the genesis of adieu in dimensions

Unfolded within balance measured by fortune.

This ledge is where legions have leapt alone,

Hallucinating a spiritual destination or

A character trait elevated and labeled as an edge.

Repeated is this mistake by the masses, the hordes:

Heavies and lightweights, buddhas and angels.

Mudras with swords, blood dripping curvilinear

In birth, battle, and death—no angles ignored,

            all feared.

Ritual then is this heartbeat.  It’s neither

Harrowing nor boring to behold belonging

                           to the midwives

                            and middlemen

Who plot and plant scandalous stories about me:

            attempts to ghettoize me. 

They call me everything from murderess, Mab the mobster,

Fake, mountebank, soulful brain, magnetic maven, and

Crazy wisdom goddess, when, after all, honest . . .

I am no more than noire creator of the cosmic

Pulp ache recycled drenched, then dried

Of all energy mine long before Eve cried.

Maybe these egregious extremes are

Popularly railed at me more than scars

Of bone orchard alphabets set in words

Incised into organs eternalized in ether

As constellations encyclopedic for either

This reason or that—one, two, or three . . .

Countless causes maybe.  About the innumerable,

            the untold,

Many would agree—I won’t analyze. It'd risk What you may

Deductively misconstrue as a portrait

In puzzle pieces of many lives traceable

To wasting much else as merely raw material in a process

Not as inevitable as the turning of epochs, the gush

Of my chemical upheavals, which can shock

Even the most docile into wild deliriums—

Though no miracle worker am I when the “mute” talk.

Moon most apocalyptic of mine did flow mead wine.  All

Cried, who hadn’t died in a raging war I ended

Peacefully through my period as Lady Rainbow

Untouchable . . . mended—knickers once in a twist

Discarded into the Krishna blue as a dove of bliss.

I’m known to be impervious to time—lock

Of my hair, resplendent bow serpentine

tied

      in spring

                    as clockwork

To more than cleverness about the sweet entwinement

Of the unending eroticism that is Mother Nature

And Father Time embracing in glory and grime

To fashion the blend that veils my visionary visage sublime.

O, their sexual servitude in more playful

Positions than creation, preservation, and destruction!

I exalt their nonstop embrace as praise most shrewd.

Though it may be my candor about violence

And kinkiness constant quantum and macrocosmic,

The climate is more exotic, subtle, subdued to confuse

And highlight my war paint softer than candlelight

In return to romance, for the revolution over melting

Pot and cauldron has been won in the West.

At the plateau of this razor-shaped canyon,

I’m here on solitude’s precipice, which overlooks the ocean,

Though location has little to do with the bitterness

I have to battle on account of how I massage Lady Fortune.

In this lodge, above the primordial juice now polluted,

Evolved divine legislation’s responsibility,

Then it descended to the diabolically imprisoned

In human flesh as a Gnostic fetish with flares

That flashed in possessiveness to ignite all hellish cares.

I am less the custodian than the cause

For this slipshod, ramshackle appearance of a lodge

Under renovation to be more chateau than mirage.

Interview

February 23rd, 2025

California Poets Interview Series:

Nelson Gary, Poet, Author, Professional Clinical Counselor

interviewed by David Garyan

DG: Your most recent project, Pharmacy Psalms and Half-Life Hymns—For Nothing, which I’ve already had the pleasure of discussing with you over extensive email correspondence. To say the least, it has captivated me and being one of the first to now see it has been a great privilege. Such a monumental undertaking must be driven, above all, by passion, by limitless energy, and that’s why I’d like to start with that. How did you feel when you commenced this work, to what extent were you pushed to the abyss during its composition, and what did you experience when writing the last word?

NG: Out the proverbial gate, thank you for interviewing me! Thanks for saying our “email correspondence” has “captivated” you.  I’m more than glad it has. It’s “captivated” me too. It’s mindful to refer to our email correspondence with its “messy vitality,” a term I learned from architect Frank Gehry. The emails are excellent building blocks. They possess what James Joyce would call “wideawake language” and “cutanddry grammar.” When I went to the James Joyce Centre in Dublin to gain a better understanding of Finnegans Wake—as well as myself, of course—and visit “the Prick with the Stick,” a statue of Joyce in the Big Smoke, I was already inspired by punk rock and implementing modes of its expression in my work, but I was yet to be inspired by the twilight language of the Tamil Siddhas. On a spiritual basis, they fiercely rebel against the status quo grammatically and in other ways more similar than dissimilar to punks.  Punks do the same on a physical basis. Both Tamil Siddhas and punks do it intelligently. Yeah, I’ll cannibalize the email correspondence at points because, hey, it “captivated” you, and, hey, it “captivated” me. We should give readers the chance to be “captivated” too? 

By the way, the privilege is all mine, David, to show you the book before anyone else outside the project.  I have to say it’s also an equal honor to be in the company of your brilliant interviewees, including Dana Gioia, the book’s publisher Daniel Yaryan, and Robert Pinsky, who translated Dante’s Inferno—wow! I love Dante; I mean, I really dig Dante! I dig Dante more than most people. How did I feel when I commenced work?

I was gleefully surprised that many poems I’d written for Donna Fuller, my psychotherapist mother (mostly when she was on her deathbed), were going to be published, but I knew more verse had to be written. When I’d turn onto or turn off Topanga Canyon Boulevard close to where I live, I’d often—I mean, really frequently—think to myself: “It’s a long way to Wellville.” The Road to Wellville is, of course, a novel by T.C. Boyle, who also wrote a great, lesser-known novel set in Topanga Canyon titled The Tortilla Curtain. My mind wasn’t on these masterpieces. What it was on was getting the healing properties from myriad sources, pancultural sources, onto the page. It’s still “a long way to Wellville” because the book is the first step towards starting Vénus Noire, a social reform movement and organization. It’s already started a little.  In court over a lawsuit concerning Vénus Noire, which I won, a judge said that I “could be the Steve Jobs of social reform.”  The judge ruled that the lawsuit against me was “baseless.”  While this is a huge compliment about “Jobs,” it also gave me a huge sense of responsibility in doing a good job with Pharmacy Psalms and Half-Life Hymns—for Nothing, the launching pad for Vénus Noire. Simply put, at the outset of the project, I felt inspired and soberly so because I felt a deep sense of responsibility to the material, especially the material that was immaterial, spiritual, which was yet to be created on the page.  I knew what I had to do.  Stop writing and start transcribing, taking dictation.

The poems, which were written about 15 years ago, were filled with symbols and metaphors. If people in the field of psychology read them, they could’ve misdiagnosed me with a mental illness I didn’t have when I wrote them. I have bipolar disorder, I’m proud to say, which is in remission. I haven’t had a manic episode since 1998. I felt a profound sense of responsibility to my mother that I didn’t have until I entered a forensic psychology master’s program. Getting a master’s in psychology, like she did, changed not only me, but also my understanding and admiration of her. It wasn’t enough all those years later for the poems to be deep or even groundbreaking. They had to be healing; that’s what my mother was about, healing. She was a psychotherapist, a healer. To write a healing book manually without concerning myself with whether it was brilliant—and a healing book that wasn’t a self-help book—required writing about 750 more pages than I went into the book with.  Too much brilliance makes life unlivable for others. In the Rig Veda, one of the structural inspirations for Pharmacy Psalms and Half-Life Hymns—for Nothing and an inspiration in other ways, Surya, the Sun God, is too brilliant for Saranyu, his consort, so she splits and transform herself into a mare for a proverbial stretch. Surya searches for her and sees that she has turned herself into a mare. He turns himself into a stallion, and they reunite, make love—Vadavaka (“the Mare’s Trick”), a Tantric lovemaking technique, which, in some sacred literature, gives them horse-headed twins, the Ashvins, the healers of divinities.

My life had recently taken a turn back toward mystical ecstasy while I was studying for my comprehensive oral examination to earn my master’s in forensic psychology. Helen Aja Hammersmith-Bond, my maggid, which is a holy helper to Kabbalists, had reentered my life after a three-year absence. This reunion was one of the happiest in my life. When I’d started studying forensic psychology at The Chicago School of Professional Psychology, I’d stopped practicing Kabbalah. I was in a state of extreme darkness when I made that decision, believing that there was too large an abyss, too large a chasm, between Kabbalah and forensic psychology for me to bridge. The book is a bridge across that chasm.  The best Kabbalists live with one foot in the spiritual world and the other in the material realm. The harmonious, dynamic union of the two is the essence of the supernatural experience, regardless of what one’s spiritual beliefs and practices are. Through clairaudience, a thrilled Helen informed me that this volume was a major opportunity to show the similarities and differences between oracular utterances as well as mystical and prophetic writings and words uttered by those “apparently” talking only to themselves, which, if their words were written down, some of them would be transformed into profound, breathtaking verse as opposed to merely psychiatric diagnoses.

I was also a little frightened because she let me know that it was essential for me to practice theia mania (“divine madness”) again within the context of my own history of mental illness coupled with my professional experience as a chemical dependency counselor and recent studies in psychology, specifically forensic psychology. Practicing divine madness is a spiritualized form of negative capability in which practitioners make themselves an absence for the presence of a deity. In Pharmacy Psalms and Half-Life Hymns—for Nothing, Helen Aja Hammersmith-Bond is that deity, Lady Wisdom, Sophia, the Holy Spirit, with multiple aspects that account for why humanity is pancultural. To my being, she’s nonbeing. Nonbeing is similar to the emptiness in a room that allows people to move in it and even place furniture in it. Nonbeing is emptier than emptiness. Nonbeing is comfortable in emptiness, but its home is in nothingness.

It's as the Tao Te Ching says, “We work with being, but nonbeing is what we use.” Other than words on the page, she’s absence. The book is an elegy, a collection of interrelated blues songs, battle songs, psalms, and hymns of saudade (“the presence of absence”). A half-life is the time it takes for a drug’s active substance in the body to decrease by half. Pharmacy Psalms ends on page 680, and Half-Life Hymns is 340 pages, exactly half.  More than one of the fellow strugglers I elegize died by drug overdose; whenever the law intersects with psychology, it’s a forensic psychology issue, so the use of illegal drugs from which they died was a subject studied in my graduate-school program. It filled me with deeper sorrow and more resolute determination to better the lives of struggling addicts—and, for that matter, alcoholics too. The book’s a visceral documentation about many matters that are far from what’s generally considered part of observable, empirical experience in the natural world, such as drug addiction, substance use disorder. Therefore, the volume is a supernatural one, even the process of creating it. The supernatural is the union of the spiritual and the material.  Process is documented here and there in the volume. It’s manual in its word-processing of dictation taken in my state of trained, long-experienced Kabbalistic clairaudience, a form of divine madness. For me, in most all ways, shapes, and forms, it’s about hearing and seeing the unheard and unseen as well as hearing and seeing the heard and seen in debatably new ways and definitely different ones, including the deceased, who are referred to as the Marigold People in the text. It’s as worldly as it is spiritual. The abyss between the living and dead is vast, but it’s possible to bridge. 

The veil between life and death can be split, and the text documents going across the pond. Ha! I don’t mean going from New York City to London on a transatlantic flight—at least not altogether. I mean, going from the living side of the pond to the dead side, going back and forth. One element that makes transatlantic twilight language profoundly different from most forms of twilight language is its strong focus on transmigration, going across the pond, but this spiritual experience and its lexicon is frequently couched in material stylistic touches, such as the interplay between Americanisms and Briticisms, not just based on vocabulary, but also government—I mean, grammar. I’m the American; Helen’s the Brit.

On a cellular basis, life and death are synergistically enmeshed generally with no or little human awareness in a meaningful, experiential sense. During the creation of Pharmacy Psalms and Half-Life, I began existing in a fuller sense with an awareness of death within me on a biological basis and in other ways. It’s the Taoist experience of nonbeing in harmony with being, a wholeness complete with intimations of immortality.  From the inception of Pharmacy Psalms and Half-Life Hymns—for Nothing, I recognized that there’s an abyss between the spiritual and the material in many people’s lives, and this filled me with additional compassion and grief. I wanted to close this gap with poetry that was indisputably on the page, yet somehow elsewhere in ways that could be intuitively sensed by readers, then traced, explored, and experienced in their own daily lives away from the psalms and hymns. The book is, on the surface, frequently wild, hot-blooded, and spontaneous, but, deeper down at the same time, it’s restrained, cold-blooded, and calculated. Helen Aja Hammersmith-Bond is fiery but stoically so. When one considers that Pharmacy Psalms ends on page 680 and Half-Life Hymns is exactly 340 pages—half 680—the downplayed, methodical dimension of the volume resonates. I’m a practitioner of Baudelairean reverie and calculus, but it extends beyond form into the realm of content.

This book’s dynamic symmetry of form and content is one of the reasons that I don’t believe someone without a strong, practical understanding of psychology could have word-processed it. There’s an abyss between me as poet presented in a narrative context on the material plane and me in creative flow as a working transcriber on the spiritual plane, sometimes at peace with being a master’s student of forensic psychology and sometimes not. There’s that tension in the book because of a lifetime of mixed experiences in the field. Some of them are dramatized; others are just reported. Not to have examples of poems of mine amidst the plot and subplots would be not to show me as a poet but merely tell readers I’m a poet or was a poet—Helen’s a better author than that.

She shows things.

In the text, the dying and death of the poet is the birth and growth of the transcriber. What shows my past work as a poet is “Unmade Bed, Twin Volumes Contemeditation.” It’s a reflection on Twin Volumes, a book published by Carroll Stockard at Ethelrod Press and financed by the Vatican. This alerts the reader that some of the contents of Pharmacy Psalms and Half-Life Hymns—for Nothing are connected to the narrative to deepen that part of my character, which is a poet, while also secondarily furthering plot. F. Scott Fitzgerald said, “Character is plot, plot is character.” He knew what he was talkin’ ‘bout! As a poet, transcriber, and person, I’ve had ambivalence towards psychology, even as a master’s student, especially as that at some points, but paradoxically within the context of this interview, though not as much in the book, I loved being a chemical dependency counselor. Truthfully, I have some ambivalence towards poetry too. It made it easier to give up being a poet and become a transcriber. When I look at things, I do my utmost to see both sides and have emotions that are congruent with those perspectives. Working on my ambivalence as a person overall—in many other areas—was a major catharsis for me that happened through the healing tool, the healing instrument, of Pharmacy Psalms and Half-Life Hymns.

This ambivalence eventually breaks into an abyss in Half-Life Hymns. The abyss opens its mouth wide as all hell and threatens to devour me. The gruesome, sharp fangs of the abyss cut into me here and there, and I bleed with a depressive episode with psychotic features, nourishing its insatiable guts.  In the bottomless pit of psychotic depression, I’m forced to take leave from graduate school and my practicum site, Golden Space, and claw my way out of darkness visible. Clawing my way out of the abyss is no guarantee, so I might not finish my graduate studies in life as in letters. I may just want to be “a poet on the beach,” all my elegized, psychotherapist mother wanted me to be; this contemplation goes through my mind a lot during the book.

Being tested for penile cancer was another occasion in which the abyss opened, this time as a vagina dentata. In the book, there are complex conflicts to be resolved between spirituality and body, flesh, as well as poetry and psychology, and this can be easily identified at various points throughout the volume in myriad ways. There are also points of deep connection between spirituality, body, poetry, and psychology. There’s an abyss, a gulf, between the name of the author on this volume and the actual author of it. In a very real way, after being “crucified with Christ,” as Biblically prescribed in Galatians 2:20, my soul and psychic contents are being examined by a forensic pathologist, who’s Sophia, Lady Wisdom, the Holy Spirit.

I’m going to return to saudade, “the presence of absence” generally defined. It’s the palpable sense of the abyss, the void, created by loss, the death of a loved one. Transatlantic twilight language, a mode of communication that I derived from Tamil Siddha twilight language, is also called conversation about the void. This conversation is the one most frequently had in the book, the one I’m forced to have because most of the people I know are dead. While manually writing the book, I believed the abyss was the best venue for disclosing life’s profundities. If you’re in the abyss, people leave you alone, so you can get a whole lotta work done. In most elegies, there’s a focus on the deceased, and they’re written about rather constantly. In Pharmacy Psalms and Half-Life Hymns—for Nothing, the focus is on the void created by significant others’ deaths and the environment created by staring into the abysses of losses, the absences of their presences, experiencing the chaos of the traumas and resulting grief with a focus on what’s real in the present, then mapping out how to recover, how to heal myself and others one line of verse at a time—one word at a time, one counted syllable at a time. Versified reportage on the details of the dead’s lives is kept to a bare minimum because they exist in the past tense, other than in the case of family members from whom I have a genetic inheritance. And even in the case of family members, the details of their lives are still minimal because the book’s about living without them, not with them. Pharmacy Psalms and Half-Life Hymns—for Nothing is very real in that way, and that it faces the absence of pillars in my life without putting on the blinders of memory and sinking into the prolonged, euphoric melancholy of nostalgia.

I find this form of sentimentality to be potentially dangerous. It offers no solution to processing loss and grief in a healthy way. Not only elegies, but also people in their daily lives overdose on the prolonged, euphoric melancholy of nostalgia. A loss is helped by the euphoric melancholy of nostalgia for a period of time or upon occasion, such as the anniversary of a death or a birthday, but after a prolonged period, it can cause grief to disintegrate into depression or prevent someone from fully grasping the absence of the beloved.

Having COPD forced me to gaze into the abyss of my own mortality, and this was another aspect of the book that was cathartic. I did more than gaze into the abyss of my own mortality. I did more than even absorb it! I transcended it while transmigrating with Aja, the Orisha, to the Land of the Dead, Hell, and the ripped Kingdom of Heaven in Half-Life Hymns. As was one of my spiritual goals, I experienced Philippians 3:10: I came “to know Christ—yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death.” I have a knack for transmigration, probably because of my Samhain-Halloween birth.  I’ve assisted shamans and shamankas from all over the world.  With Aja as a guide through life, death, the afterlife, and the place where they meet in the ripped Kingdom of Heaven within, in the midst, and beyond, way beyond, I became a better leaf doctor. Leaves refer to the two sides of a page on one sheet of paper; I did a lot of writing in the book and outside of it in graduate school as well as at Golden Space—leaves.  A leaf doctor is a kind of shaman or shamanka—a healer.  As an Orisha, Aja is a nature goddess, who presides over forests with all those leafy trees.  Shamanism and existential-humanistic psychology, my theoretical orientation, have some meaningful similarities. The lessons I learn from Aja, the Yoruba Orisha of healers too, help me to become a better shamanic counselor and person of letters, a better leaf doctor in both these ways, by book’s end.

Taking an Orisha for a guide was one of more than a few notable shifts in my belief system, which informed the volume. In my pancultural understanding of the Holy Feminine, Aja, the Orisha, is an aspect of her along with the Hindu and theosophical aspects of Aja. The Hindu aspect is the holy, “unborn,” energetic, living epithet of the primordial deities before they are fully formed. Helena Blavatsky, Theosophical Society co-founder, defines Aja as “the first Logos on the plane of illusion.” Aja, “the first Logos,” existed before cosmic creation took place, a point in time that could easily be regarded as illusory in human perception: we didn’t exist yet! The point in time I’m really trying to get across here is neither a point nor a time.  It’s timeless pointlessness. In timeless pointlessness, only the Holy Trinity existed. In Proverbs 8:22, Lady Wisdom says that God created her “before he created anything else” in timeless pointlessness. From a Kabbalistic perspective, my prayer life, which is documented without the prayers themselves written down, is centered on teshuvah through tefillah, returning the word and Word back to their source in nothing, timeless pointlessness. Even with having one article published on quantum cosmology, which is in the friendnotes, endnotes, processing timeless pointlessness into everything in general and nothing in particular in verse was a bit of an abyss that put me to the proverbial test as a person of letters.

This Goddessey is most explicitly described in Half-Life Hymns. It would have only been possible through one of my meditation practices. Through Eugene T. Gendlin’s Focusing techniques, I became more somatically aware of my living and dead cells.  This progression in my meditation practice changed my conscious experience and my unconscious mind. I became more aware of Holy Sophia, Helen Aja, Wisdom, the Holy Spirit, in a psychospiritual way on a biological basis. The book chronicles my practicum experience working at Golden Space with clients in their twilight years, who have memory loss issues, such as Alzheimer’s disease. At Golden Space, many clients died, so the abyss, as the open grave, was staring into me with my terminally diseased lungs. Of course, their deaths created voids in people’s lives, including mine as their counselor. Out of this universal void, the abysses, the graves of the deceased, which also dug voids into the hearts, minds, souls, and lives of mourners, returned Helen Aja Hammersmith-Bond, my maggid, whom I call the Holy Feminine. In my decades-long and disciplined practice of theia mania, I transcribed her words. The book’s setting, though not frequently described, has me in a state of loss and grief surrounded by dying people in their twilight years, doing a Search for Meaning Life Review. 

As far as my beloved dead, insights and visions formed based on what they would want me to do with my life.  In part, Pharmacy Psalms and Half-Life Hymns—for Nothing is about fulfilling their desires, notably working on a master’s degree in forensic psychology. It’s about making the dead in my life grateful on the other side of the pond. You wanna get a better idea of what death is, death being a loss of control? Transcribe.

And, of course, one way of making the dead grateful, the Marigold People, was communing with them and manually writing an elegy for them interwoven with an epic of spiritual warfare and the love story of an invisible lady, Helen Aja Hammersmith-Bond, and me, a visible person.

These are observable, measurable processes that were motivated by nothing, the abyss, the void, created in my life by the deaths of my mother, grandmother, father-in-law, and 17 friends and associates who died within approximately nine months. The abyss or nothing was a starting point. Why not start with nothing? The universe did. God did. There’s nothing observable or measurable in a bodily sense to relate to the 17 on the physical plane. I wasn’t so much pushed but inspired to have empathy for the beloved deceased, becoming as one with them in the nothingness as I possibly could. The only way I possibly could, in the most meaningful sense, was mystically through following the instruction of St. John of the Cross, who taught me what was necessary to be married to Wisdom: “That thou mayest have pleasure in everything, seek pleasure in nothing. That thou mayest know everything, seek to know nothing. That thou mayest possess all things, seek to possess nothing. That thou mayest be everything, seek to be nothing.”

In retrospect, I’ve gazed into how I’m depicted in Pharmacy Psalms and Half-Life Hymns and seen myself as the void, the abyss, that nothing, who’s had his debt of sin cleared by the blood of Christ and grace of God. My divine madness practice is centered on the Holy Trinity, so both Christ, the Son, and God, the Father, had proverbial hands in pushing my fingers on the keys—not only Helen Aja, Lady Wisdom, the Holy Spirit (it’s just my body is her temple, not theirs). In maybe a more universal sense, the book is the life, death, and autopsy of the everyman Adam, who happens to be a person of letters, resurrected as a new creation in oneness with Christ, the Word. I mean, all I can ever be to a reader of this memoir in verse, who doesn’t know, is person of letters, literally, other than maybe a shot of me smiling and waving and hopefully looking so fine. On a more personal basis of egoic concern, I had too often placed literature as a priority higher than life itself, even the Holy Trinity. Literature remains a high value. It’s served me well and served me the opposite when I made it my master. The Tantric wisdom, which I acquired when I was a Kundalini yoga teacher, is particularly true in this context, a lesson I’ve learned again, this time in every proverbial fiber of my being: that which can bring you up is that which can bring you down.

One way of interpreting the book is a series of healing rituals performed to be delivered from the sickness of placing one specific area of life above divinity, others, and life itself—life in general, life as a whole, which includes death. The book shows the death of an author resurrected as a transcriber; in this transition akin to a bardo, there are abysses countenanced and crossed to cliffs of peak-experience mountaintops like the ones in the Santa Monica Mountains where I live, offering life-affirming visions shared with readers.

Readers, readers, readers are also treated to mine and Helen’s experiences in the dark, fiery abyss of Satan. This provides contrast. But they’re treated to much more than the dramas of this toxic environment. The spiritual warfare between Aja, who’s also known by leaf doctors, healers, as Wild Wind, and Satan, “the prince of the power of the air” (Ephesians 2:2) with me siding with her continues throughout the book in the frequently musical form and layered content. The warfare is centered on me dancing against Satan to prove the soul exists at the risk of losing my own. Both Satan and I agree that the soul is nothing. My war against him is to prove that the soul has value as that nothing which can be everything—St. John of the Cross.

The spiritual warfare gets particularly hairy in its explicitness starting with “Halloween Weeds,” a poem about visiting my mother’s grave and performing a Judeo-Christian Chöd ritual. These rituals were developed by Helen Aja Hammersmith-Bond and me after receiving knowledge about the Tibetan Buddhist practice from poet and former Beyond Baroque Director, Richard Modiano, who’s the descendant of Abraham Abulafia, the founder of Prophetic Kabbalah, a person who has also had an influence on my spirituality. In Twin Volumes, a book financed by the Vatican, Helen and I “test the spirits” (1 John 4:1).  The word we received back from publisher Carroll Stockard was that the book contains a series of “exorcisms;” that was the Catholic view, not his. Carroll, an old punk of a genius architect, who illustrated the back cover for Earth A.D./Wolfs Blood by the Misfits, is Russian Orthodox. Richard wrote that this spiritual practice of mine and Helen’s reminded him of Tibetan Buddhist Chöd.

Helen and I took the insights we could from Carroll through the Vatican and Richard’s and created Judeo-Christian Chöd. It’s a prominent practice in Pharmacy Psalms and Half-Life Hymns—for Nothing. Most of the spirits we test, as is documented in the new text, aren’t human.  In Psalm 82, the Lord addresses the “gods.” To Helen and me, this includes “goddesses,” even though they’re not explicitly mentioned in the passage. They’re strongly intimated.  The quotation marks, in the Psalm, alert us that these “gods” and “goddesses” are really just spirits compared with the Most High God of Psalms 82. Paul illustrates the many deities on Mars Hill, but this doesn’t include Eastern deities. New Mars Hill, one of the main settings of the book, does!  Pharmacy Psalms and Half-Life Hymns—for Nothing shows interactions with the divine, both West and East. My beloved, loving wife Lil bought me a massive, stone Mars Hill altar. Its inscription reads, “To an Unknown God” (Acts 17:23), same thing as in the Holy Bible. This invisible divinity is ultimately from whom I take my orders. Description of this abyss and giving voice to Satan, its subtle ruler, adds to the triumph of overcoming it as well as him and many other related and unrelated obstacles as well as the tragic pathos of not doing so. Intellect can be a remover of obstacles, but it can also be an obstacle. Wisdom triumphs over intellect, and that’s one of the healing glories of Pharmacy Psalms and Half-Life Hymns—for Nothing.

When I wrote the last word, I felt I had been written inside and out—and then some—and not just on the page; writing is a lifestyle well beyond the composition of words. For a significant period when I’d go into my backyard to meditate, I’d receive a clairaudient message, a mantra, a repetition, from the Holy Feminine: “Death, stupid.” I’ve thought about this in terms of different religions’ afterlife beliefs and how life continues eternal. “Death, stupid.” I’ve thought about it in terms of the First Law of Thermodynamics: energy can’t be created or destroyed, only transformed from one form to another. “Death, stupid.” My friends’ overdoses have been said by others to have been “stupid.” My friend Elliott Smith, one of the greatest songwriters of the past 100 years, stabbing himself to “death” twice in the chest has been called “stupid” by some people. These people, along with different significant others of mine, who are deceased, are elegized in the book and again known as the Marigold People in the book. We have feasts. “Death, stupid” could be their chorus to me at book’s end: I’ve considered this possibility. My cigarette smoking that caused COPD could be said to be “stupid.” “Death, stupid.”

“Death” can make the wisest of people “stupid” and the stupidest of people wise. What I experienced was resurrection in the most vital of ways when the book was finished with “death, stupid.” The two words propelled me towards new life, then further into new life. It’s been slow. It’s been gradual. It was the “death” of the past “stupid” me. Putting off the old man, Adam, and putting on the new one, Christ, after being crucified with him, is like what I experienced as a practitioner and teacher of Kundalini yoga with ego “death.” To complete the goal of ego “death,” Kali, an aspect of Durga, becomes the center of practice, and she gets her due in the current book. One of the first stated goals is to kill my conditioned ego.  “Death, stupid.” In the end, the aspect of the Holy Feminine, who was communicating “death, stupid,” was Kali, “the black one,” the goddess of “death.”

During “Big Brother Black Sheep Blues” in Half-Life Hymns, some of the Marigold People believe Kali and Aja are one and the same, not because of their color but because of their strong relationships with “death.” While the Holy Feminine is multifaceted, she’s one. Maybe visualizing a diamond would be helpful to everybody. “Death, stupid.” The word “death” let me know Kali was with me and had been through the Goddessey of Pharmacy Psalms and Half-Life Hymns—for Nothing.  “Death, stupid.” When Kali (Sanskrit: “She Who Is ‘Death’”) stated, “Death, stupid,” she was firstly announcing her presence, then pronouncing her judgment on the ego—her holy, forensic psychospirituality verdict. My conditioned ego got a “death” sentence.  I’m didn’t appeal. My conditioned ego got executed. Helen Aja Hammersmith-Bond, Lady Wisdom, the Holy Spirit, executes the description of my desired conditioned ego’s “death,” a crucifixion—with Christ—in concise and thorough detail at length. “Death, stupid” was my living soul’s response to my dead conditioned ego. Looking back in an interview on a book that looks back on my life, it’s challenging to make sense about certain things. 

Sometimes, the sense of the soul isn’t the sense of the mind. In the end, there’s Kundalini ego “death” and Freudian ego strength for me as a mystic and forensic psychology master’s student, who became a criminal justice contractor. Suicide by lit of my conditioned ego; that’s it. That’s the piece! What my Spirit-guided soul did with my conditioned ego wasn’t give it more things to learn in more social constructs. My soul gave my conditioned ego things to unlearn that it had somewhat and other things that it hadn’t unlearned at all, so it’d move deeper and more completely into regions of the unconditional that are at the core of spirituality. For example, through the process of this book, I became more unconditionally loving—even to myself! If “death” is the opposite of life, then the conditional is the opposite of the unconditional—you get my proverbial meaning on this. The book doesn’t tell anyone what to do with their egos, souls, or minds—just what I did with mine. I share; I give.

On a financial basis, I’ve gotten nothing from doing this. In fact, because of this, I’m operating at a loss. We’ve talked about the risks of writing a long poem. Pharmacy Psalms and Half-Life Hymns—for Nothing has placed every single, solitary area of my internal and external life in some degree of danger. On “King’s Crossing,” Elliott Smith sings, “I took my own insides out,” so did I; I had some help from divinity. My guess is he did too.  Elliott Smith had written “KALI THE DESTROYER” on his arm before he died, and I’d also taught him Tamil Siddha twilight language, a Tantric communication system. I know it mostly from studying its Hindu past, but it also has Buddhist and Jain traditions.

In the past, I’d had thoughts that I was the Second Coming, and I’d had thoughts that I was the Antichrist. These thoughts had directed some of my behavior. This polarization is most clearly poeticized at the beginning of the volume in “Christ and Antichrist.” Adam also figures in the poem. This polarization is one of the abysses that the Holy Spirit helps me process in the text through the Hegelian triad: thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. Being on trial for these thoughts, I could see some of them as delusions that had adversely affected my behavior. Up on these beefs is a big part of the book.  Am I not guilty by reason of insanity? Am I innocent of more than I’m guilty of? Whatever the case may, my ego received the “death” penalty, which was what I’d shot for.

The book is an account of the ways I’d lived and how I died, “suicide by lit,” literature, as it says many times in Pharmacy Psalms and Half-Life Hymns—for Nothing.  It’s objective, in a meaningful way, because Helen Aja Hammersmith-Bond is the author; I’m only the transcriber. And there are things transcribed in Psalms and Hymns in first person as me that my will and ego would never have allowed had they not been dissolved in a nearly countless series of divine madness rituals. They eventually became a singular, clairaudient conversation classifiable as conversation about the void. The void is what I became in the creative process more than anything else and did so pretty early on, almost immediately, as it should be, as it was in ancient Greek rituals, which involved the Pythia, the high priestess and oracle, of Apollo’s temple in Delphi.

DG: You’ve said, above all, this is a poem about healing. Its length suggests a resistance against instant, snappy, momentous, bite-sized information. The book’s size itself requires a confrontation with how knowledge and ideas are communicated in what you’ve described as “hyperreality.” Do you intend this book as a healing for society in general, or the body and mind? 

NG: I intend the book to be healing for society, one body and mind at a time, reader by reader. Forget Foucault by Jean Baudrillard, the Pope of Postmodernism. Forget Baudrillard. Hyppereality as being more real than real is a kind of fakery and sometimes trickery to him. Postmodern?!  This is ancient. It goes back to Plato’s Theory of Forms in his Republic. Don’t forget Plato. What’s important about hyperreality in my book is that there’s no fakery to it at all. The only meaningful trickery in it, other than the trick or treating of my Halloween birth, is the graphic depiction of me as a gigolo over three decades ago and as gigolodeon in the present-day turning secondhand or once-removed phrases from the Goddess, the Holy Source, who maybe frequently speaks in the voices of others.

The reason why there’s no fakery is the book covers many experiences of superconsciousness, which is more real than real, and for any form of consciousness, there’s an experience. We know superconsciousness quite well, and it’s more real than real, though many of us perceive it to be the opposite—atheists, for example, and those who hold to their own religious beliefs as the only ones that are sound and valid. They rule out the more real than real experiences of other religions created, in meaningful part, by superconsciousness. I mean, c’mon! Superconsciousness is what’s created every major religion in the world. Hyperreality is dinner chat from the postmodern view, and don’t get me wrong. I love dinner and postmodernism! What I noticed about certain trance states of my decades-old divine madness practice is I could perceive how leisurely surfing the Internet was a simulation of it—part of the reason why so many of my friendnotes, endnotes, are from the Net. The book gives readers an idea of mystical trances with something they’re entirely familiar with—surfing the Net. The Internet is referred to as “a mentor” in the book, and I’m sure others feel the same way themselves about the Net.

Is it a real experience of a divine madness trance? Of course not! But it’s a simulation worth having just like the simulation of the real world provided by the Net is generally one worth having. The reader gets not just product, but a healing dose of the process, and again, forget Baudrillard.

Remember Magritte.  He painted a perfect pipe, universally identifiable as such. He painted the words: “This is not a pipe” beneath it.  The painting’s called The Treachery of Images. It’s also known as This Is Not a Pipe. Magritte isn’t being deceptive with his words, and people who are truly dim don’t understand how he couldn’t be.  Clearly, it’s not a real pipe. It’s a painting of a pipe. This is a massive difference! Now I love Baudrillard, and he does have a point about the trickery behind creating things that are more real than real to manipulate human beings, especially for the sake of consumerism.

In the sensory bombardment many of us elect to experience through the Internet, television, and films, what Baudrillard brilliantly adds to ideas, which explore reality versus illusion, is the idea that simulations exist in such a way that they’re not any less or more real than the reality they simulate. It becomes a question of the motivation behind the simulation. I’ve been transparent about my use of simulations from the Internet. These simulations also come from literature, music, painting, sculpture, film, and even television. More than occasionally in Pharmacy Psalms, they’re entwined. The friendnotes, endnotes, are documentations of this. At the beginning of Proverbs, Wisdom takes her stand “at First and Main, at the busiest intersection,” the center of the universe. This is part of an epigraph in “Pharmacy History,” the first poem after “Prelude: Timeless Pointlessness.” The epigraph ethically lets the reader know where the action will be happening. In many ways, the volume is simple. Most of its language is this way, but its field of allusions, once-removed material, simulations, could be considered by some to be cognitive, affective, and sensory overload for the purposes of healing, growth, or both. The Universal Room, my workspace, is a factor in this.

DG: Poets see themselves as solitary creatures, but the mind is a network—it functions because of the ideas and concepts that it connects with. Even books, according to Foucault, exist within an intellectual network, “within a system of references,” (images, convictions, allusions, thoughts, and so on) that redefine the borders of what a book can be about, much less what it actually is. Before we talk about theory, I’d first like to ask about the involvement of Daniel Yaryan in the making of this book. Could you elaborate on the indispensability of his role?

NG: Daniel Yaryan was indispensable in bringing out the book. The contract with another publisher had amicably dissolved, and he offered to publish the book. Without him doing this, the book may never have been published. It’s not easy to get an over 1,100-page book published, especially when over a thousand of its pages are poetry. In terms of making the book, he did a great job with the layout. Importantly, the original cover concept was a reproduction of a painting of mine called Black Heat, White Light. Darrin Brenner, the graphic artist, didn’t simply reproduce my painting. She did a graphic redesign of it. I was pleasurably shocked by it! It was a far better reworking than what Robert Rauschenberg did when he erased a Willem de Kooning painting. I was uncertain about letting what she had done to my painting stand as the cover of the book, though I did like it, maybe even loved it.

Daniel and I were standing next to my cherub chest of drawers in my bedroom—windows open to a beautiful day with a panoramic view of the mountains—before going out for lunch, Greek food. I asked him what he thought of Darrin’s work. He exclaimed, “It’s a home run!” We decided to used Darrin’s brilliant recreation of my painting, and I’ve since come to love it passionately. Here’s the thing. I came around to seeing it was the best thing for the book. Daniel and I were thinking of what was best for the book, and it stayed like that.

Why Daniel’s so wonderful to work with is he realizes everyone has a role to play in the making of a book. It’s just like a band; everyone has an instrument to play, and what’s important is the song. What’s important is the book, every aspect of it. This includes the layout, cover art, marketing, and promotion, not just the writing. The trouble happens when egos, glued to their roles in the publishing process, take over. And people don’t prioritize the project above their egos. Daniel was professional and never prioritized his ego over the book. I told him something like, “People don’t last; some books actually do—for centuries for countless people who had nothing to do with the making of them.”  He saw my point. This was evidenced by him giving me a silent, knowing look and a nod of the head; then we went to Greek food and talked about Pharmacy Psalms and other projects of his at Mystic Boxing Commission.

DG: Let’s now focus more on the process of composition. In a previous email you’ve stated that “Writing a poem with a pen is composing with a guitar. Writing with a typewriter is composing with a piano. Writing with a computer is writing with an organ. With a computer hooked up to the Internet is writing with a high-end, modern synthesizer for more reasons than you can integrate samples, copy and paste text from outside sources and work with it or just leave it as is. Psalms and Hymns embraces all of these compositional techniques.” Could you elaborate more on how you selected these sources? In other words, is it an even division of sources you discovered by accident as opposed to looking for something in particular?

NG: I look for the right tools, other than the piano, the typewriter, these days, but every day, I look at a laminated advertisement for a Burroughs typewriter, which Daniel Yaryan gave me as a gift because I love the writing of William S. Burroughs. I almost completed a film as a consultant and screenwriter with director Rod Pitman about the last months of Burroughs’ life. I worked on taking the videotape footage of Burroughs during this period and contextualizing it as a narrative based on Cities of the Red Night, The Place of Dead Roads, and The Western Lands. I actually have a picture of Mr. Burroughs below a Clash poster celebrating their historic 1981 shows at Bond’s International Casino. Lightly printed words are superimposed over the picture of William S. Burroughs, and his words are quoted in large, dark, bold, capital letters over and on his forehead: “YOUR MIND WILL ANSWER MOST QUESTIONS IF YOU LEARN TO RELAX AND WAIT FOR THE ANSWER.” I call my study, which is also an art studio, The Universal Room. It’s an art installation that’s important like the pen, computer, and computer hooked up to the Net are. The typewriter played an extremely minor role beyond the pictorial in the contents of Pharmacy Psalms, and I’ll get to that.

I’m really prepared and deliberate when it comes to choosing my writing instruments, but, at the same time, I’m opening my mind, heart, and soul to the infinite possibilities of composition in a state of complete surrender—divine madness, negative me to make space for divinity. I have a notebook and pen on my nightstand. Sometimes, I get ideas (Helen gives them to me), and I write them down instead of going to my study and word-processing ‘em. Going from the bedroom in the cozy sheets to the study changes my state of consciousness. I let my eyes adjust in the bedroom sometimes, but truthfully, I really don’t need to see what I’m writing to know what I wrote. I like to though. The nightstand gear helps me maintain the hypnagogia, that twilight between sleep and wakefulness. But more than this, writing with a pen limits the thoughts of Helen that I can humanly transcribe. Writing with a pen is good for focusing on details that may be word-processed into a whole poem later. The pen helps me stay focused on what to Helen is the essence of the thing.  For every five of her thoughts, I have one of my own. With a pen, I don’t have the cognitive wherewithal to even consider jotting down all my own. Her thoughts are much faster. 

From a psychology perspective, I’ve explained the cognitive process of Helen, my no-mind, giving my mind intrusive thoughts, adding that it’s a totally voluntary process on my end and part of my divine madness practice. In psychology, there’s a lack of insight about the differences between inspiration, which literally means “God-breathed” and intrusive thoughts. You tell a psychiatrist that God is breathing on you; they’ll probably want to put you on antipsychotic medication. I hope to change this, and the book is the first step in doing so. I’ve said my divine madness practice, but really with Helen Aja Hammersmith-Bond, it’s our divine madness practice. My divine practice is maybe best on second thought. It’s my practice and her mastery. An important part of this practice, which isn’t mentioned in your question, that I’d like to touch on is the aleatory methods. Chance operations, Hammersmith-Bond’s casino. Practicing them is where complete surrender enters the proverbial picture, but it starts from a deliberate place, a resolved determination to be open to the infinite possibilities of composition. 

To compose a decent number of poems in the book, Helen and I used The Kabbalah Deck: Pathway to the Soul, a modernized Hebrew Book of Lots, by Edward Hoffman, a humanistic psychologist, who’s a leading researcher in the field as well as an authority on many subjects in Judaism. To some people, this may seem like the poetry that James Merrill wrote while using a ouija board. Helen and I are currently using the deck not only for writing purposes, but also for other forms of communication, and we’ve done this for many years ritually and casually.  We also consulted the I Ching for a brief time, and the results of that are in the book. The closest thing to being “by accident” is chance, and these chance operations are a significant part of the process. They’re somewhere between a guitar’s external devices—guitar effect pedals—and hiring an engineer in the studio or a sideman to play sessions. As far as the guitar, the pen, the thought process of a divinity is not the same as the thought process of a human being.  She does make a few accommodations sometimes—ha! This book is not mine and Helen’s first rodeo—Twin Volumes is thousands of pages.  About 400 pages saw publication.  Mostly, in this book, the pen, the guitar, is played as bedside blues notes for our psalms and half-life hymns.

Environment brings much different influences. There’s no place like The Universal Room that I know of, other than Daniel Yaryan’s Kamstra Sparchive, and while I’ve performed in his space, I’ve never collaboratively composed in it with Helen. Or composed in it at all.  If Helen and I feel the art installation-study’s getting stale, I take a pen and notebook much more often somewhere away from home to write. I’ve been collecting notebooks since I was a child. I still have some of them from childhood. Some of them are blank, tabula rasas. I just like the way they look. My beloved, deceased mother did the same thing with notebooks and pens. While transcribing Pharmacy Psalms and Half-Life Hymns—for Nothing, I used some of her writing as epigraphs for poems. Helen made the selections from my mother’s journals.  Pens and notebooks will always be part of my writing kit, my writing gear, my writing rig. The pen, the guitar, is rejuvenating and inspires new thoughts, but I can’t write as fast as I think, let alone as fast as Helen thinks, so there’s a different spontaneous editing process before the text is stabilized. I never transcribe or compose on a laptop elsewhere. It defeats the purpose of having to be more selective.

The typewriter, the piano, was used for the poem “Skull” many years ago, and this one Helen didn’t author, one of the few that she didn’t in the book. With a typewriter, you can capture more thoughts, more of the process. Jackson Pollock, the great Abstract Expressionist, is a captivating master of capturing the process. I probably will never compose a poem on a typewriter again. It’s distracting unless you’re a perfect typist (I knew I was making errors the moment I made them), and it takes time that the computer doesn’t to correct typos.

I’m not a perfect keyboardist.

With the piano, it starts to become a question of how much you want the energy of “messy vitality” or a perfect poem. With a computer, the organ, you can capture even more than you can with the typewriter, but this can generate cognitive or sensory overload. If engineering this is what Helen and I are shooting for, it’s an excellent instrument. With a computer connected to the Internet, you can capture the cosmos, and Helen Aja Hammersmith-Bond, Lady Wisdom, the Holy Spirit, has “at First and Main, at the busiest intersection.” Anyone, who reads the book, will agree with me. And this takes a lot, a lotta, a lotta work to capture all in the vaster net of nothing. It can be overwhelming for me. She doesn’t mind, but she does care. Jonathan Franzen reportedly disconnected his access to the Internet. I get it.

A hundred or so pages of friendnotes, endnotes, may seem to be a lot, but it’s a proverbial drop in the bucket compared with the notes gathered online that are in files.  We’re talking about thousands of pages. Because of the satanic interference and everything “at First and Main, at the busiest intersections,” details must be collected and sometimes cross-referenced. Wisdom is the most attacked being ever created, and Satan’s so, so subtle in his evil a lot of the time. His evil has a significant amount of simulated goodness on the surface. That’s one of the ways he works in the beginning with people to take them to the depths of Hell. Did I say that before?  Yeah, right, I did, the subtlety thing. Not the surface to the depths. Okay. There’s been talk about an annotated version of Pharmacy Psalms and Half-Life Hymns—for Nothing being published (in the future). It’s fitting for an elegy that many, if not most people, cited in the endnotes are dead.

DG: One of the people elegized in the poem is Hubert Selby Jr., someone you were quite close to. Would you say he is the reason Pharmacy Psalms turned out to be, above all, a poem of the senses, and would you go even further to say that he is the reason your writing came to embody a Rimbaudian type of sense experimentation?

NG: Hubert Selby Jr. should be mentioned on the back of the book along with the other people I elegized, whose names are there. That was my oversight. If there’s a second edition, his name will be there. That said, I wouldn’t say that Hubert Selby Jr. “is the reason” the volume “turned out to be,” in your mind, “above all, a poem of the senses.” Selby’s not a member of the Holy Trinity the last time I checked. And I’ve never confused him with Helen Aja Hammersmith-Bond, Lady Wisdom, the Holy Spirit, the true author of the book—not once! It’s an extremely interesting question about Hubert “Cubby” Selby Jr. I think the poem is pretty equally one of the mind, body, and soul, but above all else, it’s one of the Spirit, the Holy Spirit.

The “sense experimentation” is in the gigolodeon, her using that temple, my body, as a theatre to show me to others. At one point in my life, my body became a high-rise hotel. I had to level it. Too many people taking up space in my head for free. It became a squat in other words. The body as a temple is nothing new. This is common in Christianity. When I was a gigolo in my early twenties, it wasn’t just about having sex with usually older women. It was also about them showing me to their friends. As Sophia’s gigolodeon-husband, she helps me process not only my sexuality from the latency stage to the present-day with her and my earthly wife Lil, but also my whole life. Wisdom, the Holy Spirit, is, based on the Bible, older than time. This is all based on the Judeo-Christianity, and I need to bring up the importance of the Shema, loving God with your whole being.

Selby had next to nothing to do with this. Being “ecstatically crucified” with Christ, as Marc Olmsted comments I am in Pharmacy Psalms also had its moments of sensation far from ecstasy, but overall, Olmsted is much, much more correct than he’s incorrect. What Selby had to do with the book as a writer is those few to several moments when the Holy Spirit turned me towards those experiences in my distant past that were definable as the visceral abysmal. Selby’s a master of the visceral abysmal, but literature had next to nothing to do with our relationship. I’ll explain his influence on me in a minute. In fact, after a few years of being close to him, I told him I believed in Jesus Christ. He explained that had he known this, he never would’ve gotten close to me. For as long as I have a memory, I’ll remember what he said to me in those moments about Jesus Christ: “If I could, I’d piss in his nose.”

In terms of mind, body, and soul, Pharmacy Psalms is holistic and balanced from where I sit, but I have deep respect for your interpretation. It’s just not mine is all. I have deep gratitude for you letting me know that the element of “the senses” is this strong to you in a Spirituality book. This is of high significance to me because the book explicitly and often aims to heal the divisions many people experience between their minds, “senses,” bodies, and souls. I wouldn’t say Cubby is “the reason” that Pharmacy Psalms has a strong sensory element to it, but without Cubby’s mentorship, I wouldn’t have been able to engage in the “Rimbaudian type of sense experimentation” you insightfully touch on mindfully. I would’ve been unable to survive it without Selby. With the Holy Trinity, the central focus of it, I thrive as a “sense” experimenter in life and hopefully, that’s helpful to readers. For me personally and not necessarily for anyone else, Cubby helped me stay in my “senses,” my right mind, despite having some extremely dark and disturbing thoughts, and more importantly even when the thoughts were there, take the right actions: behave properly to others and treat myself well, and do as he said, “Love your demons. Love is the one thing they can’t take” and acknowledge that your demons are parts of what cause you to grow in the opposite direction.

Occasionally, I had to maintain the disturbing darkness for a long time to write it down to show people that they weren’t alone in it—"dark night[s] of the soul,” as St. John of the Cross calls them. It’s great to write a world of positive, life-affirming messages, but it’s also great to show the world’s dark side for empathy’s sake without sugar-coating it. And really, they’re equally positive. That’s why, as far as rock ‘n’ roll, I love The Rolling Stones. The Stones’ lyrics, empowered by music that fits them oftentimes perfectly, are about the light, the dark, and the ambiguous twilight in between where it all happens, where it goes from either light or dark. Pharmacy Psalms works with the light, the dark, and the twilight—transatlantic twilight language. Selby, whose writing concerns itself with only darkness, at least, the work of his I’ve read (Last Exit to Brooklyn, The Room, The Demon, and Requiem for a Dream), never read a word of my literary writing, not one; I never asked him to.

I read him internal dialogues between my everyday self and higher self, the second intervening and helping the first. And sometimes, believe it or not, he’d say some dialogues helped better navigate corners of his mind that were dark and disturbing, but mostly, it was about him helping me in this way with the pitfalls before I ran towards them or even leapt into them in situations of my life that had nothing to do with alliteration, rhyme, setting a scene, developing a character, or constructing a plot—ever, not once. That’s what he did with his Creative Writing students at USC; I was far from ever being one of them; in fact, I wasn’t one at all. Also, about Cubby, he could appreciate the necessity for me to be methodically out of my “senses,” for me experiencing ecstasy, which is the sense of being out of one’s “senses.” Part of doing this is how I made a living when I knew him, and it’s principally how I do now.

And this is where you drawing a comparison with Rimbaud is so perspicacious. Please let me break it down. Here it is: Kabbalah is an ecstatic practice. I started practicing in 1987. I taught Kundalini yoga. It’s an ecstatic practice. Theia mania is an ecstatic practice. Ecstasy comes from the word “ekstasis,” which means “to stand outside of oneself,” to be out of one’s “senses” to varying degrees for one purpose or another. As a counselor, who has worked with shamans and shamankas from all over the world, going out of myself, ekstasis, in empathy is essential in every session in all consulting rooms I’ve ever worked in. I’d say this is true for most all caring mental health professionals. All these spiritual practices predate the life and methods of Rimbaud by centuries, and they’re central to the book, whereas Rimbaud isn’t.

Cubby has nothing to do with any of these spiritual practices, and it’s a lot of what the book is about. In a way, the book is just as much about experiencing one’s “senses” as it is about being out of them while practicing ecstatic forms of spirituality or providing clients with empathy, being out of my “senses” to be in theirs, to walk in their proverbial shoes. Yet, I’m very much simultaneously in my own “senses.” In other words, I walk in clients’ shoes with my own feet and am strongly mindful of this and professional about it. I mean, I may have elegized Selby more than many others because more than them, he helped me not only heal but also grow. And that’s what’s central to the book, healing and implicitly growth, the latter being almost self-evident. In the book, I grow from being a psychotic, drug and alcohol-addled gigolo, who has just finished running with criminal, Soviet defectors and living in an eighties’ paradise of sex and cocaine, the white goddess, to being largely a polymath autodidact, who’s clean, sober, sane, and spiritualized through multiple spiritual disciplines, to a married man who, at 50, empathically perceives the revolving door between homelessness and incarceration and does something about it by entering a forensic psychology, graduate-school program to replace the inhumane turnstile with something much better, a social reform movement and institution, Vénus Noire—what Charles Baudelaire called Jeanne Duval, his muse. The narrative shows the many, many external and internal steps of growth that start in the eighties and continue until 2018, as well as the obstacles and setbacks.

A manic episode is also ecstatic, but there’s a big difference between a manic episode and the spiritual practices I described before.  A manic episode is not voluntary and controlled. I haven’t had a manic episode since 1998. Selby got psychosis. He had a deep understanding of it. When he was still slamming dope, which he did, on at least, one occasion with William S. Burroughs, he was in in a mental institution with composer and pianist Bud Powell. Cubby told me “they said” that he had “morbid, depressed, paranoid schizophrenia,” schizoaffective disorder, depressive type. He was of loving assistance to me in developing a system of self-monitoring in which I could go in and out of my “senses” on a voluntary basis, usually for the good of others and never for their harm. I became too militant with the self-monitoring. I became Big Brother, who’s strongly related to the gigolodeon. I knew Cubby for many years and talked to him on average at least two hours a day—the dialogues.

I can count the times on one hand that we talked about literature. One of those times, I told him his work reminded me of Louis-Ferdinand Céline. He took it how I meant it—as a compliment. He knew I wrote poetry, but I never shared any of it with him. He actually shared a poem with me called “Psalm XVI.” It’s a relentless attack against God in which Selby is judge and jury, unable to forgive God to whom he writes, “There is no forgiveness for you / but I will forgive the demons.” Cubby’s poem is an impassioned expression that’s essentially the opposite of my belief system, and he knew that when he read to me. I loved the poem for its masterful expression of the visceral abysmal. I’m not someone who needs to agree with someone to love them or what they do. This is, after all, the backbone of empathy and the essence of inclusive diversity. There are plenty of writers, who in form and content, create work that’s much different from mine, and I love what they do. The content of Pharmacy Psalms is much different most of the time than the content of a Selby novel.

S.A. Griffin, one of the editors of The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry, solicited “Skull,” a poem inspired by quitting drugs and alcohol at 18, which could fairly be called Rimbaudian; then he asked me for other poets to add to the volume. I said, “Todd Moore, Jim Carroll, Bob Dylan, and a few others, then Hubert Selby Jr.” He didn’t know Selby wrote poetry.  Selby was thrilled to be in the anthology. I never told him I had a hand in that. Cubby also knew I was a journalist, writing for Heroin Times. If he was one of the over a million viewers a month or 80,000 subscribers during those years at the beginning of the millennium, I never knew one way or another. I never asked him. Literature and related subjects just weren’t what our relationship was about. It was about discussing the dialogues I wrote daily, which were always focused on self-monitoring cognitively and emotionally, rarely, if ever, on a sensory basis. There’s something more important between people of letters than literature: the ability to write it and survive doing so with a smile without a needle in the arm or a gun in the mouth. Cubby? I loved him.

I remember one other time that we talked for a few minutes about literature, a novel I shelved called Tongue. Until recently, I’ve shelved most of what I’ve written. Just call me Emil Dickinson, at least back then—a good name for me for many years. Turning over a proverbial new leaf has been going well. I’ve been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes, one in the last two months. Tongue. It’s a dark and disturbing novel. I’d been rereading it, checking passages repeatedly. I told Cubby what I was doing with the book, checking it repeatedly. I didn’t tell him its name or anything about its subject matter, not even that it was dark and disturbing. He said, “You’re checking it to see if you’re still here.” The ungrammatical insight was blindingly brilliant, and I stopped checking, and it’s an insight that has resonated with me meaningfully on different occasions, such as when I was line-editing Pharmacy Psalms. More than once, Cubby said that he was “a mouth looking for a scream.” I could relate to that when he said it. I found “a scream” for my tongue and mouth. Helen Aja Hammersmith-Bond screams in the volume under discussion, but usually, she’s just stoically rapping.

As far as literary influences in terms of “the senses,” the body, Kathy Acker, the reigning punk, postmodern queen of lit, though deceased, is a much greater influence on Pharmacy Psalms and Half-Life Hymns than Hubert Selby, and she’s stated as one in the volume. I even have a photograph of her taken by V. Vale in The Universal Room. It’s called Kathy in White. I look at Kathy Acker every day. She’s above a Montauk Manor sticker and below an artistic rendering of James Joyce. The only novels I read in graduate school were hers and Thomas Pynchon’s. I read them on semester breaks. In her “hyperliterate” Memoriam to Identity, Rimbaud is central, and I loved that book. I read her Empire of the Senseless when it was first published and fell in love with it. Her work strongly appealed to me again when I was studying forensic psychology, so I returned to her as an author during vacations from studying forensic psychology, and In Memoriam to Identity is the novel of hers that moved me most.

Rimbaud didn’t have as much to do with my sensory “experimentation” as you might suspect. My love for Rimbaud started long before I met Selby. My mother had me reading Charles Baudelaire when I was 11. Not long before that, I’d started writing poetry, showing, in her mind, real love for the form and a gift for it. Mother . . . .  It wasn’t long thereafter that I read Rimbaud. Being a substance abuser, notably of psychedelic drugs, I related to his “systematic derangement of the senses.” I believe V. Vale calls me “deranged” for this reason in his blurb, testimonial, for Pharmacy Psalms and Half-Life Hymns, the latter title being very much of “the senses” and something I took from my graduate studies in forensic psychology. While drugs, substances, were influential on my poetry in my teens, they were more influential on my career ambitions. I had gotten into Harvard on appeal, and my goal was to eventually become a neurologist, then a psychiatrist. During my final year of high school, I frequently took LSD to derange my “senses” and experience a simulation of psychosis, so that I could gain as close to a firsthand experience of it as possible and learn how to help people suffering from it. Drug-induced psychosis is, of course, different from other psychoses because you almost always know the psychosis is caused by the drug—in my case, LSD. My psychedelic substance use went from being a form of scientific inquiry to a form of hedonistic pursuit. As a result, I didn’t graduate high school, so I didn’t—almost needless to say—go to Harvard.

I spent two weeks in a county mental hospital, a snake pit, before going to rehab. In the mental institution, I was given experimental drugs. A group of rehab doctors and one from UCLA, a toxicologist, later couldn’t identify the drugs. In the snake pit, I was also given involuntary, invasive surgery on my spine from which I still have a scar. My experience in the snake pit was the beginning of my ambivalence towards psychiatry particularly and psychology generally. It wounded me, and it did so deeply because I knew and know that I wasn’t the only one who has had crimes against humanity perpetrated against him in a place that’s supposed to be—for screaming out loud!—a place first and foremost, through and through, about healing. This country’s history of treating the mentally ill has some beyond abysmal periods, and they’re addressed in Pharmacy Psalms and Half-Life Hymns. We’re in an abysmal period now with the homelessness-incarceration business, and this book is a giant step towards changing this.

To do this, I’ve had to change, and the book chronicles this. Marc Olmsted writes of me being “ecstatically crucified” with Christ and mapping out “Poe’s extraordinary acuteness of the senses.” I don’t know about Edgar Allan Poe. Although like Kathy Acker, I have a photograph of him in The Universal Room. From the perspective of my industrial, wood, concrete, and steel writing table, he has my back. Being “crucified with Christ” and “no longer” living but having “Christ” live “in me” (Galatians 2:20) is presented, as it truly was, a hardcore mind, body, “senses,” and soul experience or in your words, “experiment.” Christ living “in me” then and now is ecstasy almost ineffable! And I was beaten to a pulp the size of a worm, slithering as lines of poetry, by the madding crowd before being “crucified” on the periodic table in the four dimensions of the space-time continuum. Without being beaten to a pulp the size of a worm, without being Edgar Allan Pulp, why would I opt for crucifixion? I wouldn’t. I didn’t.

What this hardcore, holistic “experiment,” which is common yet individual in Christianity, creates is a new experience of life, death, and liminal states with accompanying twilight times and places. This is core, core, core to the volume more than anything else. As far as “the senses” component of the volume, my forensic psychology studies contributed more than any author that’s in the canon of literature or should be, such as Rimbaud, Selby, and Acker. In the same proverbial ballpark as forensic psychology, my Focusing practice and former experiences as a Kundalini yoga teacher contributed to making this a strong book on a sensory basis. Jason Gary, one of my brothers, co-directed Modify, the seminal documentary about body modification, and this continues to make a strong impression on me.  Jason and his work were certainly a source of even inspiration! for the volume, as is stated in its pages.

My mother is at the center of the work in terms of it being an elegy. She was many things, including a Christian mystic for well over half of her life. Joshua Corwin, a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, writes on the back of the book that I’m “a mystic” too. “A mystic” is generally not a person who’s considered one of “the senses,” but I am. I’m whole. My mother attempted to extinguish her “senses,” kill herself, over 35 times. My mother’s suicide attempts are put in place as the mindful element, put in place together with me being “crucified with Christ” put in place as the spiritual-soulful element, put in place together with the somatic, the bodily, the sensory element, of me having COPD, a terminal illness, and you begin to hear some of the intimate music that’s faced in Pharmacy Psalms and Half-Life Hymns, which was almost titled Wisdom’s Collage, two words that appear in the text multiple times. Collage is the main art form in The Universal Room. Because the idea of Wisdom, the Holy Spirit, as an influencer on “sense experimentation” may be dissatisfying, I’m going to relay the following footnote about The Universal Room from Pharmacy Psalms and Half-Life Hymns—for Nothing, one of its 52:

“For 19 years (from the time I moved from Willard Street in Panorama City), I turned my garage on Clarendon Street in Woodland Hills into a workspace-art installation. It had a firm basis in functionality, allowing me to write, draw, paint, and rehearse poetry and school presentations (at the end of its existence). I designed the space to produce a changing sensory overload to which I'd have to become periodically adjusted, preventing habituation. My workspace's powerful and intricate sensory information connected to all five senses pretty much without recess when anyone was in this space.  

“One reason for me creating this environment was to create a desirable, nurturing, and fulfilling atmosphere that I would not want to leave, thus allowing me to do as much work as possible. Another reason for the construction of a space of this nature was to prevent me from being disoriented when I would break from my epic periods of solitude to attend occasions, appointments, or classes at The Chicago School of Professional Psychology, anything with unfamiliar and/or dynamic sensory information. In order to prevent becoming habituated to this space and allow myself to make transitions to other ones smoothly, I'd change elements of my workspace, as stated.  

“‘One can travel the universe in a room’ is a remark that has been attributed to Lao-tzu. The specific content of my multipurpose workspace was conceptualized around this proverb, so it was also a personal cosmology, which 19 years ago was an unremarkable two-car garage. Up until about 10 years ago, the workspace had many visitors (family members, friends, associates, and construction workers).  Removing all that existed in this space was cathartic and remains somewhat disordering and almost traumatic (definitely saddening but definitely gladdening, too, for I believe I made this decision for a good, even visionary, cause that will help many people); it is a long proverbial road from leaving The Universal Room, as I created and knew it, to starting Vénus Noire here in the hesh, a perfect place to develop my psychospiritual theories into practices as a counselor. The described workspace-art installation was my actively constructed, multimedia microcosm of the universe. The Universal Room strongly reflected interpersonal and personal learning experiences in many spiritual and intellectual disciplines, which were interrelated through its design details, and elements of it were, of course, interactive. ‘Heaven’ was what Aaron Cohen, a co-founder of the ‘Drop the Debt’ campaign, for whom I worked as a Jubilee 2000 activist, called The Universal Room.” It was part of the composition of Pharmacy Psalms, as is the new Universal Room. My tentative belief is that its environment had maybe more of a meaningful effect on the sensory aspect of the volume than any and all human writers, other than myself as its transcriber. The studio makes a difference in the recording of an album. I’m voicing the same idea with The Universal Room and composition of the work.

A great composer hears the unheard and makes it the opposite—sets the world on its proverbial ear, creates a sensation. I’m influenced by punk and many other forms of music. My maternal grandfather was a member of the National Academy of Music at age 10. Having poetry that I wrote at age 11 published by adults is one of a few reasons I relate to Rimbaud. “F44.3: Rorschach Word” has a point of relation with his “Vowels.” Darrin Brenner’s reworking of my painting as cover art for the book fits that poem perfectly, and it works well for the whole volume. Different aspects of Helen Aja Hammersmith-Bond are expressed through nonstandard capitalization and in bold as well as bold italics, and there are just italicized lines along with the standard print expression, the classic expression, that humanity has been reading for thousands of years. I regard this as the lipstick traces of “sense experimentation.”  These lipstick traces make it much easier for the reader to tell where things are coming from than Ulysses by James Joyce.

Now, don’t get me wrong, David. Please don’t get me wrong. Selby and Rimbaud have been influences on my work, but in this volume, there are many other influences, and I truly believe they’re greater influences overall, as I’ve discussed. But Selby and Rimbaud are among them. In two poems of the five that you published in LAdige, a wonderful review—thank you again for accepting my work—two of the poems are quite influenced by both these fine wordsmiths, but, for better or worse, these pieces aren’t in Pharmacy Psalms and Half-Life Hymns—for Nothing. The percentage of poetry that is like these two poems is much, much less in the book than it is in the review. It’s best to pick only select passages in long poems that are like the two you published; because if not, they lose their impact. Those two poems are “My Co’ & Clonazepam” and “The Drunken Boat’s Metabolism.” The second is also a cosmic pulp poem because of the tabloid element with its chupacabras and the no culture element with its Sea-Monkeys. Sea-Monkeys are no culture, and I don’t think they’ll make the cultural leap that punk rock did. Punk wasn’t even considered no culture years ago. It was considered low culture.

Sea-Monkey are no culture to every adult without children I know, other than me. And maybe Pushcart Prize nominee Amélie Frank. She edited Fingers Circling the Moon, an octet of my novels called The Goddessey; or The Consumer Book of the Dead; this series also consists of many poetry volumes and two spiritual autobiographies. In How to Enjoy Your Life Without a Body, the first novel, there’s a chapter called “Sea-Monkeys.”

That was an excellent question, David. Thanks for asking it. You’re one bad-ass interviewer! And I mean that in the best possible way.

DG: There’s a punk rock element to Pharmacy Psalms. Would I be wrong in suspecting that?

NG: No, not at all. I think there’s a punk rock element to the capitalized, italicized, bold, and bold italicized words that’s as punk as it is Rimbaudian. What I consider myself to have done with the long poem in Pharmacy Psalms and Half-Life Hymns—for Nothing and Twin Volumes is, in a way, quite punk rock, indeed. The most obvious reason is that I’ve taken poetry back to its origin when human beings spoke to spirits and divinities and wrote it down, and we see this even in the Homeric invocations and later invocations to many different muses. Pharmacy Psalms has such an invocation and many such other features that establish its place in the bedrock of poetry. As you may or may not know, punk rockers got tired of prog rock—play classical or jazz or play rock music, not one or both of the first two with rock. Just play rock! And play it fast and loud!!!

Punks were purists and revivalists. My divine madness practice is purist and revivalist. To punks, rock music was about what happened in the fifties and the garage rock of the sixties. Guitar solos didn’t become practically part of rock music’s DNA until the sixties. By the seventies, punks believed these solos were formulaic and oftentimes gratuitous. The Ramones certainly weren’t about guitar solos. I love the Ramones, all those bitchin’ songs referencing mental health issues!!! To me, in this book, poetry is a visible being writing down what an invisible one is communicating. Punks wanted to get back to the base, same as me in this volume in the way I’ve stated. On Wild Gift, X has a song called “Back 2 the Base.” Listen to it some time, especially if you’ve never heard it. Pharmacy Psalms again gets back to the poetic base, but it’s also completely contemporary in its subject matter. And I hope, as Richard Modiano said once, that my work brings the past into the present and points the way to the future.

There are plots and subplots in Pharmacy Psalms. One of them is me studying to earn master's in forensic psychology, an area overly associated with death, though it’s quite fitting for a series of elegies to run alongside it with that common misconception. As far as ancestor worship and Gendlin, we owe our existence to our ancestors and through practicing Gendlin's Focusing, I've gotten more in touch with mine on a bodily basis, not just cognitive and spiritual bases. This is significantly illustrated in visceral and mystical terms throughout Pharmacy Psalms. About 60 billion cells die every day while we’re alive—right alongside the living cells. This intellectual knowledge became a bodily awareness while writing Pharmacy Psalms, and it allowed me to travel between the worlds of the living and dead: this is chronicled in the book.

The poem, even if it’s not lyrical, is a kind of song; at least, it should be. In other words, I agree with Ezra Pound: "Poetry atrophies when it gets too far from music." This doesn’t mean that it must have a strict, prescribed meter, not at all.  Even when there’s a rhymed couplet in Pharmacy Psalms, the most frequent music is heard in the enjambment, including within the line itself (William Carlos Williams and for that matter, Vladimir Mayakovsky too). The enjambment signifies me taking a breath within the Spirit's whirlwind of words. While it’s where I found myself breathing when reading aloud (Charles Olson), I also found it to be a natural place to pause for most everyone for dramatic tension, rhetorical punch, and the meaning of the words themselves.

Pharmacy Psalms examines many kinds of poetic expression in free verse. To me, most notably chant, and in one of those passages, it does so through neologisms. They beat the structuralist trap as far as linguistics is concerned. The trap is a word can only be defined by other words. The words in this chant are defined by nothing, yet I know they have meaning on a powerfully visceral level to the reader. Seaman Freud describes the “oceanic feeling” as “a primitive ego-feeling” retrieved from infancy. This registers with me as poetry that’s back to its infancy in terms of communicating with divinities and spirits with a punk swagger in Pharmacy Psalms. At times in the book, I'm traveling there to that state of heart-mind where the soul is liberated, and other times, I am there with Wisdom reporting on it. For the sake of poetry and psychology, that place is the unconscious. Carl Gustav Jung wrote, "The sea is the favorite symbol for the unconscious, the mother of all that lives." In the Pharmacy Psalms poem, “The Unconscious,” which has strong Jungian elements to it, archetypes, an identity of mine surfaces that’s super Freudian and punk rock—the Sex Pistols!!! No, wait, I’m getting ahead of myself sort of in a way but not really. That particular poem shows the nature of my oneness with Christ, the answer to his prayer for that in the baptismal waters of that “sea” known as “the unconscious.” In the “The Unconscious,” I’m Id Vicious Christ!!!

DG: For a book spanning more than 1,100 pages, how difficult was it to navigate between form and content?

NG: As far as form in Pharmacy Psalms, many of the lines are long. I’m going to go into the rhyming ones that are that way. I was noticing a pattern of 16-syllable, rhyming couplets that’s then followed by a couple alexandrines and other things before going back to 16 for a spell. It was that 16 and 16, the 32 Paths of Wisdom in Kabbalah. They contained much mystical content that was more accentuated than in other passages. There are two sources of poetry in the book, the Holy Spirit’s and how I transcribe it.  I invoke Wisdom, the Holy Spirit, and what I receive is the wind in a formal sense but more importantly in a natural one. The Holy Spirit is referred to as “the breath of God” and is often symbolized as the wind; therefore, she’s Aja, Wild Wind. To me, I have no wind. I have breath, and it’s not “the breath of God,” especially given the fact that I have COPD. This holy breath, which can cause a madness with some similarities to the Santa Ana winds, is in these Whitman-length, rhyming lines, but I am, like Olson, breathing with it, breathing in it. The sacred Spirit and the profane me mingle in the lines. At times, we find union in holiness as HeleNelsoneleHeleNelsoneleHeleNelsoneleHeleNelsoneleHeleNelsoneleHelen. This is most controversial, and I’ll come to that. It’s her, wind, Aja, Wild Wind, that I’m breathing her, and her as wind is God’s breath, and Christ as Word is one and the same as the Father, so the Holy Trinity is the poet. The progression of the form, verse, leads to undifferentiated oneness in content with the consummation, the complete union, of Helen and me in the epilogue’s prose: HeleNelsoneleHeleNelsoneleHeleNelsoneleHeleNelsoneleHeleNelsoneleHeleNailson!!! From the perspective of my samadhi practice, which is described in the volume, Helen Aja Hammersmith-Bond, Lady Wisdom, the Holy Spirit, is the focus of my practice, my spiritual reflections. Practitioners of samadhi become one with the objects of their meditation. I become one with Helen, which is not the same thing as one as Helen. Where it’s controversial is the reader is left to question whether the book is, to some degree, a radical political statement about gender identity, gender politics, spirituality, and organized religion because I’m gender-fluid. This fact is made clear in Daniel Yaryan’s foreword and in the main text. Gender identity is a subject explored in a radical way on theological basis by having a Holy Spirit, who’s female. I don’t identify as a male or female. I identify as a person.

My gender was formed by having a strongly cisgender father and an equally strong cisgender mother. She was a famous, feminist psychotherapist, and my gender identity has been more formed by her since I began working as a chemical dependency counselor to now working as an associate primary psychotherapist. In the two cohorts I was in forensic psychology, I was the only male who finished studies, and that’s the way it is clinical psychology too. Psychology is a female-dominated study on that level—70-80% are women. While gender and sex aren’t the same thing, they’re, of course, related. My father has his picture in The National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. Furthermore, based on traditional gender roles, mine, with my earthly, loving, beloved wife, Lil, is more definably feminine, and she’s, based on traditional gender roles, more masculine than feminine. We’re whole people, y’know, not just feminine and masculine. To me, from birth and because of the socialization process, everyone’s bigender to some extent, and we’re either rigid or fluid about this or unaware of it to varying degrees.

Part of the book is also answering Christ’s final prayer to become one with him and his Father, which I answered by being “crucified with” him, identifying my oneness with him in being “a worm” (Psalm 22:6, the Psalm of the Cross). Attaining “absolute oneness with” Jesus Christ, as Oswald Chambers explains needs to be done, cannot be done without the Holy Spirit, Wild Wind, “the breath of God.” My divine madness practice is centered on the Holy Trinity. By every theological estimation worthy of consideration, there’s an indisputable monotheism to those three aspects, the parts of the divinity in question. Maybe a way to look at it is the Father is the mind, the Son is the heart, and the Spirit is the soul of one being. More than anything else, mysticism involves becoming one with a higher power. The content of all this action towards union can be read as form on practically every one of the volume’s pages of poetry.

It can be seen in a concrete way with the line slithering across the page. The Mayakovskyesque slithering is the only way I can read the poem aloud without getting winded—pardon the pun.  There’s a pattern to the serpentlike slithering across the page in that it’s frequently divided into three parts, three for the Holy Trinity. The serpent is sometimes Satan, but other times, it’s the serpent of Kundalini, which literally translates to “curl of the hair of the lock of the beloved,” Helen Aja Hammersmith-Bond, Lady Wisdom, the Holy Spirit. The serpent is also me from the beginning of the book to the end, following Jesus Christ’s instruction to his followers to “be as wise as serpents and yet as harmless as doves” (Matthew 10:16). The content of spiritual warfare is mirrored in the form.

Now, here’s the problem with formalism in Pharmacy Psalms and Half-Life Hymns—for Nothing.  Oftentimes, when poets set out to write in a form, such as an Elizabethan era Shakespearean sonnet, it’s almost as if they’re painting by numbers inasmuch as they know the poem has to be 14 lines in iambic pentameter and have a certain rhyme scheme, and it has to pose a question or problem in the first part and resolve it with a couplet at the end. When I set out to manually write Pharmacy Psalms and Half-Life Hymns—I’m just going to refer to it as Nothing for a bit—I didn’t have the premeditated organization to transcribe it in the orderly fashion I described in the last paragraph, other than one aspect, which was suggested to me by the male Holy Ghost and the archangel Michael during the composition of Twin Volumes: rhyming, syllabic verse, hers. She’d been holding something back on a form.

I was told to experience rhyme by the Holy Ghost and count syllables by one of those angels who sometimes guards Wisdom as the tree of life to please her by drawing closer to her. Rhyming, syllabic verse was a form that Helen started exploring in TV and continued to explore in Nothing. By critics, Marianne Moore has been called one of the most feminine poets ever, especially given her time. It’s hardly just her content. It's her use of syllabic verse in a world of accentual verse and free verse, which had mostly been written by males. In her early work, she did, in fact, rhyme much more than in her later work, but poems defined by mostly couplets were not ones she was frequently composing to the best of my knowledge. Nothing has a large amount of syllabic verse in it. Given the historic precedence of Moore, this form is feminine and distinctly the voice of Helen Aja Hammersmith-Bond, Lady Wisdom, the Holy Spirit, because it rhymes, almost always in couplets.

Moore’s Christianity strongly influenced her syllabic verse, so this form has a connection to the Christian content in Nothing. The long poem is a risk personally, interpersonally, and financially. It becomes much more of a risk when much of it is rhyming, syllabic verse! You could say Marianne Moore’s work is a touchstone for a meaningful amount of the form and content in Nothing. But Nothing departs from Moore’s work in form and content in a radical way. The form of Christianity that she practiced was Presbyterianism, a denomination of the Church, one of the mutilated, dismembered pieces of the Mystical Body of Christ, mutilated, dismembered because these body parts, these denominations, are separated, sometimes most sharply and sometimes historically violently over matters of theological difference.

The devil has been behind this a good deal of the time, sure. Many times, his torturers and assassins have been clergymen and theologians, who’ve been his monkey dupes. This horrific body of the living dead, this zombie, is a trauma that Helen Aja Hammersmith-Bond tells me to begin to assess in “Prelude: Timeless Pointlessness” as a forensic psychology investigation. I’m not the only one to be worked on by Sophia as a forensic pathologist! Forensic psychology is where the law intersects the study of the soul. The law in this case is Biblical Law. The Church is the mutilated, dismembered Bride of Christ in undifferentiated union with his dismembered Mystical Body. This assessment and evaluation of the violence to the Holy Union, cutting the Mystical Body, the Bride of Christ, into pieces, denominations, continues throughout the book.

Fingers have been severed from the hands. Even the pinkies!  For the sake of torture, some fingernails have been ripped off. The body is also decapitated, a beheading! It’s disemboweled, lungs punctured, beating heart exposed from a deeply and repeatedly lacerated chest—nipples bitten off, chewed, then spit out after blood drank. Some of its flesh is severely burned. The testicles have been scooped out of the scrotum and along with the penis have been stuffed in the mouth with chipped and broken teeth. I can tell you these things in bloodcurdling, vivid detail, David, because you know well as someone in human rights, the atrocities committed, including even clitoridectomies, and this is an interview, not the poem, one with many sweet rhymes that make a general mention of what I’ve had to countenance from a forensic psychology point of view for years.

It’s important to remember that what I’m describing here and now is a mystical body. The main question is is it, in some way, a holy body.  Please let me direct you to Helen. One of the meanings of her name is “corposant.” Corposant, Latin corpus sānctum (“holy body”). This meaning is used in Portuguese. Saudade, meaning “the presence of absence,” is a word from the same tongue. The major “presence of absence” in this book for readers to contemplate is the absence of the Holy Feminine currently—and for a long time in Western civilization. If the Holy Spirit has a body beyond the temple of the believer, then it’s a holy body. Helen, “holy body.”  What I’ve experienced with the Holy Spirit indwelling me personally is, of course, Helen, “holy body”: congruence.

People have wondered and fantasized for centuries what Helen looked like. In Nothing, Helen’s anatomy is given in lit; her name also means “torch.”  Another one of her names, unique to the text, is Lyric Anastasia Summers. This is a volume of mostly lyrical poetry, which free verse can be.  Lyric’s form, Helen’s holy body’s physicality as it’s represented in book, is distinct from free verse. It’s rhyming, syllabic couplets. What did Rainer Maria Rilke say about rhyme? Rhyme is “a goddess of secret and ancient coincidences." Rhyme is part of her physique, but it’s in a pictorial set on the page. It’s not actually her!  It’s a representation of her holy body. C’mon, Rilke! Plato, Magritte, Baudrillard!!! Plus, SHE HAS A HOLY BODY AND A HOLY SPIRIT—ALL LETTERS CAPITALIZED!!! There’s more to her than how she looks, obviously. In Greek and Russian, Anastasia means “resurrection.” She has empathy for the dead and knows well the ins and outs of eternal life.

Memory does, in fact, resurrect the past.

Lyric Anastasia Summers makes it last.

The offbeat, lyrical lines rhyming her come fast.

In the present, the rhyme dies and indwells the past.

Resurrection, next couplet.  Hear another: 

They released the young man who abducted Mother,Diverted him / to a large drug rehabilitation / center.

In transatlantic twilight language, I’m saying Helen of Sparta-Troy, the first femme fatale in the history of letters, is Sophia, Lady Wisdom, the Holy Spirit. Helen is permanently active in the collective unconscious of humanity. She’s an aspect of the anima: she is the Spirit, who inspires one to develop things to live and die for. Sophia, Wisdom, is another aspect of Jung’s concept of the soul, the Spirit, who inspires one to come to terms with the life one has led, buries one dead and leads one into eternal life. Helen and Sophia are two aspects of the same thing in a Jungian sense. In other ways, which have nothing to do with Jung, this union is elaborated on in the text. This relationship between Helen and Sophia is what Ganapathy would call “shock-therapy” when discussing the twilight language of the Tamil Siddhas.

In Matter of Heart, a documentary on Jung, Marie-Louise von Franz, a Jungian psychologist and scholar, makes a sharp, insightful observation, to paraphrase tightly: Christianity is a dying myth because it lacks a sufficiently dark feminine. This is by unanimous Christian choice. In a way, I couldn’t agree more with von Franz. The dying of the gender-fluid Mystical Body of Christ, his Bride, is because of an almost total absence of the dark feminine.

The Church is proverbially loud and clear about eternal life in the boneyard, but it doesn’t have the slightest clue about Judeo-Christian Chöd at this point in its almost 2,000-year history, but some members of its body will if they read Nothing. Without the book, they don’t have a shred of evidence that I’ve empathically contemplated the matter to wits’ end, which is where crazy wisdom begins in divine madness trances of voluntary Spirit possession and the ego dissolves and holiness illuminates the good, bad, and the ugly. In the Catholic Bible, Wisdom is called “a perfect mirror.” As a poet, transcriber, journalist, essayist, and counselor, I’ve worked hard to be as “perfect” a “mirror” as I can be. I accept responsibility in all these areas of my life, responsibility for words that have my name attached to them—many before it even gets to that point—but only up to a certain extent. The final words of Lady Wisdom, the Holy Spirit, my supernatural wife, whom I call Helen Aja Hammersmith-Bond, in Proverbs 8 are “those who fail to find me harm themselves; all who hate me love death.” The Church has largely failed to “find” her; therefore, the violent “harm” I’ve described is partially the fault of the Mystical Body of Christ, the Church, his Bride. In “Prelude: Timeless Pointlessness,” Wisdom, the Holy Spirit, dictated the following lines to me:

The Spirit’s flaming sword, the word of God, hers, Wisdom’s,

Flashing back and forth in ways I’ve learned are not random,

Theologians who forget

                                     the sword is hers

                                                                might cause

                                                                                   a situation

Wherein which Satan

                                  and his minions

                                                           win

                                                                the battle

                                                                               of

                                                                                  Armageddon.

The Mystical

                    Body

                            of Christ, 

                                          dismembered

                                                                into

                                                                      denominations? 

Or is it one, whole, working together—harmonious parts?

INVESTIGATE IT; forensic psychology is an art.

Long before many trials, forensic psychology

                                                                       starts.

Livin’ a life as a criminal

                                      creates a state mental,

Physical, economic, social (it can be a lifestyle),

Even spiritual.  The double-life hustle, struggle

Not to get popped, busted, for doing something illegal,

Takes a terrible toll

                              on mental health. 

                                                          Some

                                                                   professionals

In forensic psychology first treat clients

                                                              based on facts

Written by the law.  Is that

                                          de Kooning

                                                            Police Gazette

                                                                                   abstract?

Words are abstract, but they’re also concrete.

Police reports are sidewalks

                                                on Main Street.

Forensic psychology extends

                                              far beyond

                                                               court

                                                                       and prison.

It exists within most all people.

                                                 It

                                                   points

                                                             to Hell

                                                                       and Heaven.

I’m someone who’s studied the Old Testament prophets and Revelation since I was 11, but I’m not coming to this subject only from an intellectual perspective. I’m coming to it from a psychospiritual, experiential one as a person who has been everyone mentioned in Revelation, all humanity even, through negative capability contextualized by a long-term, disciplined divine madness practice centered on the Holy Trinity. In Nothing, I’m even Faithful and True’s white horse (Revelation 19:11); I was born in the year of the Horse, so that identity came easier than some of the others. But truth be told, even being born in ’66, I never would’ve been able to pull that one off had Saranyu not taught me the trick. Martin Luther, who led the Protestant reformation, didn’t believe Revelation should be in the Holy Bible. He categorically did not think it was inspired by divine madness. He just thought it was solely madness. This is black and white, all or nothing thinking, and I believe if Luther really contemplated it more, he would’ve come around to believing some of Revelation qualified as being fit to be in the Holy Bible.

The Protestant Reformation began in 1517 on my birthday, October 31, when Luther published his 95 Theses. About 100 years later, The Thirty Years’ War had approximately eight million Christian casualties. The parts, the denominations, of the Mystical Body involved were Roman Catholic, Calvinist, and Lutheran. The Church has enemies. It has been persecuted, and it has created enemies for itself by persecuting others. In the end, the Church Age will bloody well end. Jesus Christ only mentions the “church” twice in the Holy Bible: maybe there are some outstanding reasons for that. Jesus says something about the “kingdom” approximately 126 times. The kingdom of heaven, to paraphrase, is within and in the midst, meaning it’s in other people. Christians, such as me, need to keep in in mind at least two things. One is that this kingdom exists in others, regardless of what they believe about heaven or God. The second thing is from Ephesians 6:12: there are “spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.” While this book is an elegy, it’s also a spiritual warfare epic and the love story between an invisible lady, Helen Aja Hammersmith-Bond, Wisdom, the Holy Spirit, and a visible person, me. 

I’m not a Church Christian, but I am a Christian, a Kingdom Christian, so it’s easy to be empathically objective. I’m a Kingdom Christian and a Christian anarchist with a distance from its institutional form that Marianne Moore, with her groundbreaking form of Christian verse, didn’t have. Moore was married to and embedded with the institution. Both the institution, the Mystical Body of Christ, and the Kingdom have a heady and heartfelt union. The union is mysticism. I practice a form of faith called Christuality, which has many facets of Christianity to its diamond solidity. Ultimately, Christuality, which has Wisdom as the Holy Spirit at its heart, defines every bit of the volume’s content: every punctuation mark, every letter, every syllable, every word, every line, every sentence, every verse paragraph, and every prose paragraph of everything in Nothing. Along with the risks Helen and I were taking in just writing a long poem to begin with, we knew that the risks we were taking with form, against form, and for form were significant. In Nothing, I manually wrote the work, but, as maybe impossible as it is to believe, I’m more the written in the work than the writer. In terms of form and content, this flies in the proverbial litso, face, of much we’re conditioned to believe. Let’s go back to part of one of your emails.

Outside of the spirituality categories of “religion, mysticism, and the occult,” human beings write and have written their own literary work by almost exclusively the force of their own wills—at least, apparently—haha! But I’m in big trouble, because my book relays my observable, even measurable, thoughts, sensations, and perceptions, which are ultimately contained by my invisible soul, but it doesn’t tell you how to live and how not to. “Religion, mysticism, and the occult” does. The Holy Trinity pours my mind, body, and soul on the page like Jackson Pollock pouring paint on a canvas! Spirituality books, more generally speaking, also make a point of telling the reader what’s right and what’s wrong. Nothing isn’t a sermon or self-help book. As far as a self-help book, the only message is be more selfless.

And that message doesn’t come in the form of advice, instead it’s a dramatic narrative about someone with that as maybe his highest goal. You could say it’s the opposite of a self-help book. It’s a selfless-help book.  This is getting a little abstract. The narrative is about me as a master’s student in forensic psychology, training as a counselor. It’s known by the majority that a good counselor doesn’t give advice; a good counselor brings up good questions, asks far more questions than gives answers: this, for the record, is directly stated in the book.  Form meets content perfectly in Nothing on that concrete score.

DG: You have been interested in the synchronicity of religions, and this is apparent not just in Nothing. Can you talk about how Judaism, the Kabbalah, Greek polytheism, and the Tamil Siddhas, just to name a few, affect your views on form, and by extension poetry in general?

NG: My interest in the Tamil Siddhas came after my studies and practices of divine madness through getting educated about it via the work of Walter Burkert on ancient Greek religion (he has a book with this title), the work of psychologist Julian Jaynes on consciousness (I am now a member of his society), and my Kabbalah practice. Before all this, I wanted to have the experience of God talking to me the way he did the Old Testament prophets and John the Divine. The Holy Scriptures are “God-breathed.” I wanted him to breathe on my work, and now he has. I’m beyond grateful! I worked at getting to where I am, where I was in Nothing; it was more than just a sedentary practice of reading, contemplation, and meditation. I recognized early on being raised in the psychology field by a mother, who worked for the renowned R.D. Laing, that there were people "apparently" talking to themselves both housed and unhoused in a manner that, based on what was observable, was no different than the prophets from our physical viewpoint now and maybe then. What I get out of the Tamil Siddhas is twilight language, a mode of polysemantic, highly interpretable language. Its interpretability is quite similar to the language of Biblical prophets, and there are other similarities.

Both were strongly against the established order's oppression. The Tamil Siddhas also exhibited this in the form in which they wrote and lived—a Tantric communication system. They were against the legalism of the Hindu orthodoxy. There is a total disregard for formal considerations in their work to the point where they oftentimes don't give a damn about basic grammar—sometimes neither do I! This is pretty punk to me, and it’s informative. They have been called the voice "of the slums” and “the outcasts.” One of the things Tantra means is "to compose," generally a text involving divinity. There’s a divinity in Nothing. In Tantra, there’s no duality between the sacred and profane. For me, I see these categories as interdependent, as is shown in the formlessness of prose in relation to the form of poetry in "Butterfly Blueprints." Living in the interdependence is where holiness resides.

In Tantra, there are two forms. The right-hand form and the left-hand form. In the first, the rituals are metaphorical, figurative, whereas in the second, they’re actual, literal. Tantrism can be ambidextrous—in the sexual sense, for instance. Roles are assumed as illustrated in the text in the material world, but that doesn’t take away from their spiritual substance. This is common in Tantra. 

Sophia, Wisdom, is the most beautiful woman in the world but not of it. Helen has been referred to as the most beautiful woman in the world for centuries. The otherworldliness I attribute to Helen isn’t attributed to her much, though “the peerless dame of ancient Greece” (Christopher Marlowe) is an aspect of my goddess. Of course, her place in Marlowe’s masterpiece is otherworldly. When Helen is first introduced in Homer’s Iliad, we have a strong sense that she’s otherworldly while she’s weaving—Tantra also means “woven together.” In the Catholic Bible, Wisdom is referred to as “the fashioner of all things.” We later learn Helen has supernatural powers of voice, making the soldiers in the Trojan Horse believe their wives are speaking to them just outside the vessel, the ancient tank, even though they’re thousands of miles away. This book is a “symphony of psalms,” to reference one of Igor Stravinsky’s masterworks, only there are no instruments, just myriad voices, as the friendnotes, endnotes, show. All these voices, including mine, are coming from Helen in Nothing—history repeats. In Proverbs 8:1, Wisdom “calls out to all” humankind. Lastly about Helen, she mixes a drug, a pharmakon, in Homer’s Odyssey that removes all sorrow and grief as well as everyone’s memory. She mixes all kinds of medicine in Nothing, a medicine book, for mainly grief. Classicists, who believe in the supernatural power of Helen, would maybe argue that’s why the details of my beloved, deceased loved ones are so spare, but if they did, they would clearly see that motive is to show saudade, “the presence of absence,” a method of healing loss and grief. This would have to be a most austere person of letters with a practical mastery of at least one mystical art, one who was able to make an honest critique of how saudade is shown in Nothing. Helen is strongly related to sex, not only war and death. God invented sex. Helen perfected it.

A sexual relationship with Sophia is also very common in Gnosticism, and I consider her my supernatural wife, as is a goal written about St. John of the Cross and stated in the book with my name on it as author, a fiction. The marriage is chronicled in detail in Nothing. In Tantra, there’s no duality between material and spiritual. They’re complements, like yin and yang in Taoism, ink and paper in poetry. My former Kundalini yoga students might consider Helen Aja Hammersmith-Bond my Shakti, and what’s on the page, instead of the mat, they might consider to be a manifestation of my Shaktipat.

Let me explain Helen and Wisdom in another way to illustrate the oneness I experience. Essence is the internality of external presence. There isn’t one without the other. Originally, Lucifer was the guardian cherub of God's presence. According to Ellen G. White and others, Gabriel may have taken Lucifer’s place after the latter’s fall. In Judaism, Gabriel stands at the left hand of God with Jesus Christ at his right; it’s like Shiva standing at the left hand of Brahma with Vishnu standing at his right. According to the prophet Ezekiel, Lucifer was "full of wisdom and perfect in beauty." As far as presence, most people, who believe in a god, believe he’s omnipresent, omnipresent in the natural world.

As a creator, God's greatest legacy is the natural universe, and most people would agree it’s beautiful. In mystical Judaism, Kabbalah, G-d’s presence is feminine. Lucifer was "perfect in beauty," but Helen's beauty is more than that. It's healing, wise, and powerful, not that Lucifer’s wasn’t, and Satan’s isn’t wise and powerful. I agree with Hesiod who explains that Zeus, Helen’s father, was furious about people worshipping other people in cults of celebrity, then known as the cult of heroes, instead of worshipping divinity, so he plants Helen on Earth to start a war of epic proportions to cause humanity to stop worshipping itself—what humanity was worshipping most, at that time, was men of military might. This Greek destruction of the ego, to me, is meaningfully similar to Durga’s war against Mahishasura and triumph over him.  In my Kundalini yoga practice and that of many others, Mahishasura’s the ego, specifically mine, and the ego in general. At that time, I was one with Durga and Shiva, Durga first and foremost. Amazingly Derrida doesn't go into Helen in his "Plato's Pharmacy" in Dissemination in which he discusses language being a pharmakon, both "a cure and a poison," what the word means. Pharmacy comes from this word; and what drug prescribed doesn’t have curative properties and side effects, poisons? It's Newtonian.

In the Odyssey, Helen of Troy-Sparta, a nature goddess, Helen of the Tree (Helen Dendritis), gives her guests a pharmakon that soothes their grief but also removes their memory. Oh, I forgot I already said that. It's a wise thing for her to do because if others remembered the war, they'd hold her responsible and do her dirt, which they eventually did, hanging her in Rhodes. But it's not only about her getting wounded or killed. If she was violated again as she was when she was abducted, it could start another war. We know that Mother Nature is the best pharmacist, and here's the presence of God, a nature goddess, mixing up the medicine out of compassion for wise reasons.

In Proverbs, Wisdom is referred to as a tree of life. In Genesis, after the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden, the tree of life is guarded by cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth (Genesis 3:24). In the Russian Orthodox faith, Sophia is considered to the essence of God, the internality of his beautiful presence who’s Helen. In writing about Sophia, Jung discusses the abduction and rescue of Helen in relation to Sophia. To most people, this doesn't make any sense. To Kabbalists, however, it makes excellent sense. From a Kabbalistic standpoint, the problem in Heaven and on Earth is that the Holy Feminine is in the same place that Helen was in Marlowe's Doctor Faustus. When one thinks of God's essence being Sophia and his presence being Helen, it makes sense why Lucifer was what he was as guardian angel: "full of wisdom and perfect in beauty." How could he have been anything else?! Of course, this Kabbalistic thread is a major part of my relationship with Helen Aja Hammersmith-Bond. It’s dramatized and described in Pharmacy Psalms. Most all of what I’ve told you about Helen and Sophia being one and the same is an occult dimension of Pharmacy Psalms. By occult, I mean it isn't explicitly revealed in terms so easy to understand, particularly as it relates to the Holy Feminine and Lucifer before his fall.

In terms of trees, it’s also critical to mention Aja, the Yoruba Orisha of forests, who’s essentially an Earth goddess. I remember I was apprehensive about exploring the Yoruba religion. While it isn’t voodoo, it’s influenced it. I remember studying the Yoruba religion, being inordinately conflicted about delving deeper into it, and on one of those occasions, I had a vision of Jesus Christ and Lady Wisdom, that aspect of the Holy Feminine, directing me to buy a statue of Aja, the Orisha, so I did.

Aja, the Orisha, I discovered was another aspect of the Holy Feminine. Traditionally, she’s perceived by others in the Yoruba religion as a wise woman. In Nothing, she’s an aspect of Wisdom herself. In the Harrowing of Hell in Nothing, the Orisha aspect of the Holy Feminine is imprisoned in Hell, and there’s a spiritual war to break her out. In Revelation 22:2, John the Divine explains, “On either side of the river was the tree of life, bearing twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit every month; and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.” In Nothing, the “leaves of the tree” are the “healing” pages of the volume. The “tree of life” being on both sides “of the river” are destinations, this “life” and the afterlife. “The river” is ultimately existence. Wisdom focused on me in many ways, including my living and dead cells. I’m a microcosm of that “river,” part of me living, strongly flowing in life as life, and another part spilling over dead on a cellular basis into the afterlife. Both together allow me to transmigrate to Wisdom, the “tree of life” (Proverbs 3:18) in the world of the living and the world of the dead. I’m “the river” that she, Wisdom, the Spirit, poured out on the page after she herself was poured out on me, a slave, by Father God. The following lines, which are repeated in the poem a few times, are worth making a place for in this interview:

I am the river of the water of life

in a setting bucolic,

Flowing from the throne of God and the Lamb.

It’s as clear as crystal that I am

                   as abstract

as a Jackson Pollock.

Twilight’s lucid dreams are not mere flimflam.

Golden-lion visions out of the asylums

Do reflect God’s glory in mausoleums.

To have a better handle on my madness

Is to better understand the unconscious.

Almost needless to say, when we think of the "real presence" of the natural universe, particularly as God's creation, we think of its beauty. Even those who think of it as an illusion, write prolifically of its beauty. Mother Nature is beautiful; and as far as nature goddesses go, ones that are beautiful, Helen of the Tree makes sense, for we all know she’s the most beautiful woman in the world. In many ancient cultures, Goddess, queen, and land were strongly interrelated in a beautiful way. What makes them so beautifully interrelated in ancient Greece is that it was a culture focused on the word through philosophy, literally "the love of wisdom," and poetry. I, for one, would like to experience a global renaissance in both these areas.  In the West, what we don’t think of often is Aja, the Unborn, the name of all the Hindu divinities before they had names, even before they were born. Aja is also the Uncreated, and it means “leader” or “instigator.” Aja as the Unborn is the Holy Feminine. As the Uncreated, Aja is Father God, and as the leader, Aja is, to and for me, Jesus Christ. The Holy Trinity is as one in a single word, Aja, which is use in Nothing and learned from Hinduism. I’m sure that this is highly illegal in the legalist strains of Christianity.

Again, Tamil Siddhas rebelled against legalism, and as a Christian anarchist, I can relate to that, that really resonates with me. Further, when they write, in their consciousness, they aren’t one with Shiva. They are Shiva, and Shiva is, of course, one and the same as Shakti from a different perspective. And Shiva is formless.

What I’m trying to say is that poetry is the form that can contain everything, and it makes a good proverbial show of it in Nothing. It can contain every form, even formlessness. “Tzimtzum (Timeless Pointlessness—a Sonnet)” is as close as it gets to formlessness while still being existent—and a sonnet, to boot! The book very much contains Shiva, the formless ultimately. What Shiva’s formlessness means more than anything is that he can assume any form. In Nothing, there’s poetry; there’s prose; there’s everything. That’s one of the strengths of Nothing. It contains everything. Shiva was secondary to my life when I was practicing and teaching Kundalini yoga, but he was quite present. This form of yoga has a strong foundation in Tantra.

Again, Durga was who was central to me, and she definitely hasn’t disappeared from my life. I have statues of her and Lao-tzu in my study. I’m referred to as Old Boy Durga in Nothing. At age 58, people still call me, “Kid.” Lao-tzu means “Old Master,” but people get it wrong and say it means “Old Boy.” I have empathy for this great spirit, Lao-tzu. People get my name, Nelson Gary, wrong all the time, get it backwards. It’s happened all my life. I’m not going to have a grave marker or headstone. They’d get my name wrong, backwards.

No, seriously, I’ve made plans for a totally green burial, so no grave marker, no headstone, no rough box, grave liner, etcetera, etcetera. Readers are left to question whether Old Boy Durga is the gender-fluid bride of Christ, a part of his Mystical Body. “Crucified with Christ,” I ceased living, and then and now, only Christ within me lives. That which is not living is as obviously a ghost as the friendly Casper, and I was inspired to form the Holy Ghost Team in Nothing. Ghosts of this kind are universal in Christianity, but there’s a lack of awareness about them.

I’ve heard many people, especially New Formalists, say that free verse is "formless," and it’s not with the positive feeling that Shaivites have calling Shiva that. If one wants to write an instruction manual, one writes prose.  When one writes poetry, one can choose to write a specific, preexisting form, such as a sonnet, create one of their own or write free verse. From the Tamil Siddha perspective, they’re all "formless" in a similar way that Shiva is "formless," meaning there are infinite possibilities of form to create and uncreate, to preserve and, well . . . to destroy. Even in his dances of destruction, he creates. For example, in almost ineffable, rageful grief, he carries the self-immolated corpse of his beloved Sati, doing his Tandava dance, and because of his dancing, 52 pieces of her charred corpse fall from the heavens to Earth, creating 52 Shakti Peethas, sacred sites for the worship of the divine feminine.

This is recounted in Nothing. There are 52 footnotes in the volume for more than one reason. One of them has to do with what I’ve just said about Shiva, and this strongly relates to the Tamil Siddhas and their twilight language. I am Shiva in this dimension of the 52, carrying the people I elegize in my heart while also destroying details of my memories of them for the sake of showing the potent truth of saudade, “the presence of absence” for their good, living, breathing humanity’s good, and my own. The first half of Nothing has 32 footnotes, representing the 32 Paths of Wisdom, which I travel in worship of her. Grief is what we felt. Mourning is what we did by creating Nothing. Grief is the feeling. Mourning is what’s done with that emotion. For example, when Tito Burns, my Jewish father-in-law, died, I sat shiva, a mourning ritual, in “A Valley Psychospiritual.”

He introduced bebop to the United Kingdom as a musician with his wife, Terry Devon, a singer. After they got married and quit jazz, he worked on the business side of the music industry with Cliff Richard, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Leonard Cohen, The Who, and The Rolling Stones. My wife Lil later became their Entourage Coordinator on three tours, Voodoo Lounge, Bridges to Babylon, and No Security after she’d worked on the production end for Urban Jungle. Her father mentored Brian Epstein, The Beatles manager. When people die, I do my best to take the direction that their best insight would want me to take, and I do my best to embody their best traits that the world no longer gets the joy, peace, strength, and above all, love from in their absence, in their lack of physical form on the material plane.  What Shaivite formlessness allows is the encompassing of all forms. Every so often, it’s time to destroy them all. Martin Scorsese, who directed Kundun and more than a few violent pictures, should do a film about Shiva. Much of Nothing is free verse, and during the composition of it, I often thought of two things. 

One of them was Shiva's "formlessness" and the other was the beginning of the Bible: "In the beginning, the earth was void and without form." Twilight language is often also called conversation about the void. In Nothing in relation to this verse in Genesis, this has to do with prayerfully taking the word back to its source in nothing before God said, "Let there be light.” I also thought ‘bout a third thing with free verse during composition: free verse and the state of poetry today as the two relate to what is academically called form and its opposite. What I believe coming from a longtime divine madness practice is that poetry is at the formless beginning, "without form," and anything is possible; the possibilities are endless in terms of what forms may take shape. For me, better than anything else, nothing can contain everything. It wasn't always that one could write a sonnet without a conflict or question at its beginning and a rhymed resolution at its end. But now this is acceptable, and no rhyme scheme is needed. I’ve read published sonnets that aren't even 14 lines. Can you imagine? What this says to me is that there is a twilight, a liminal space, between form and formlessness in poetry, and I like how Nothing responds to that and other things in poetics.

DG: You have referred to Nothing as a “psychospiritual book.” Could you elaborate a bit on the term?

NG: Firstly, psychospirituality is a major part, if not the centermost part, of transpersonal psychology, a theoretical approach and my chosen one when working alone on myself, but in Nothing, there are many different approaches of psychology practiced, even psychoanalysis. Transpersonal psychology integrates prayer, meditation, yoga, and other spiritual practices for the sake of holistic healing and growth. There are purely psychological dimensions of this text.  It could be said to be about, in the main, me getting a master's in forensic psychology. But what am I giving? This book. Words about this begin at my practicum site in "Pharmacy History" where I’m counseling clients 65 and older with Alzheimer's disease and other memory loss issues—what a setting for Helen of Troy who’s known to remove grief at the price of taking everyone’s memory away; my mother had Alzheimer’s, heart attacks, strokes, COPD, and contaminated blood from a blood transfusion, so I killed her, a woman who had attempted suicide over 35 times, the woman who gave birth to my brother and me; I killed her mercifully—meaningful blues dynamics in Nothing.

See, my love killed her. My love wasn’t just for her, but all humanity’s suffering. It was a question of applying long-established spiritual values to a material situation when the proverbial chips were down, when the consequences were life and death. Readers will say I’m being a psychospiritual freedom fighter here, and a psychospiritual terrorist there—or one or the other through and through. I can see readers, who only want to see the cosmic pulp sensationalism of the text, make me for the El Chapo of consciousness. Look, when you consider the composition of the human body, we’re basically, if you only examine the measurable, observable aspects of it, pharmacies. We’re a bunch of chemicals—that’s what we are, totally! The book says we’re more than that and asks readers to have faith in things unseen after showing the readers many things otherwise invisible. In cosmic pulp, the unseen occasionally has to be sensationalized to make a visible, lasting impression, which is powerful enough to initiate change.

I’ve never been aligned with any literary movement that I didn’t create myself or with one other person, save one. I created invisible poetics with S.A. Griffin, a co-editor of The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry. I consider myself an Outlaw Poet, and I not only had a poem in that book, but I also wrote the introductory essay to the work of Todd Moore, who’s widely considered the “Godfather of Outlaw Poetry.” One time, because of my belief in Jesus Christ as my Lord and personal Savior, I told S.A. that Outlaw Poets really don’t consider me one of them. He shouted, “They executed him!” and explained that it doesn’t get more Outlaw than that to turn to Christ as an example of an Outlaw Poet. I mean, y’gnaw, c’mon! Sermon on the Mount is a prose poem! His own father willed the execution done. My mother gave me life, and I took hers away. I believe God had more than a little to do with what I did. How outlaw do you want to get for humanity breaking laws past, present, and future than killing your only son?! Outlaw Poetry is a strong force in the book because, after all, it contains ample outrage over the inhumanity of society’s, especially psychiatry’s, treatment of people, particularly spiritual ones, for what’s been centuries.

Based on an evidence-based approach, a scientific one, Erik Erikson discovered that people, such as my elderly clients, at this psychosocial stage of human development, had to work to develop integrity and minimize or remove despair about how they’d lived their lives and get to a place where they were unafraid of death. To do this, Erikson stated that they had to develop only one thing. Wisdom. What I’m discussing as a poet in comparatively abstract terms is concretely and literally what I’m doing as a counselor. As a counselor, I never told somebody to consider the holiness of Sophia, and in the book, other than in the notes, I’m not describing wisdom as an excellent and even necessary quality. We show in literature. We don’t tell.

Wisdom is whom I show in the book as my supernatural wife, but she has her mystique about her. Wisdom’s je ne sais quoi gives me uncertainty about her and much else, including myself. When I was working for clients in their twilight years, I designed an intervention that produced observable, measurable results, which were beneficial to them. It’s a fusion of what I’ve discussed about Erikson's theories and those of Viktor Frankl. It's called The Search for Meaning Life Review. In "Pharmacy History," I state, at Wisdom’s prompting, that I’m going to use this intervention on myself in this book because while I'm not 65+ like my clients are, I’m terminally ill (COPD) and must face my own mortality, so in this state, wisdom now must be central. A lot of clients died at my practicum site, and I was there for the survivors with empathic understanding, which I learned as much from shamanism as psychology—psychospirituality. The Search for Meaning Life Review is the superstructure of the book; therefore, it contextualizes much of what happens in it, and really, this framework’s importance can’t be underestimated. Having been a chemical dependency counselor and training as an associate professional clinical counselor, as is documented in the book, is psychospiritual, in and of itself, because Jesus and the Holy Spirit are referred to as counselors in the Bible, and they have been and are my guiding inspiration in helping others through counseling, though I haven’t and don’t state this to clients. They have their own beliefs about divinity or lack of them.

Reading the friendnotes, endnotes, about wisdom at this psychosocial stage, an atheist could rightfully look at the book as a scientific inquiry into personal mortality through the unconventional form of poetic allegory.

It’s one thing to write "about" the unconscious, and it’s another thing entirely to write the unconscious. The best form to use to do the second is poetry. From a psychospiritual point of view in “Pharmacy History,” it’s explained in a conversation with God that I’m healing his broken Sacred Heart. His Sacred heart is broken when we break his laws and reject Jesus as his only begotten son, which also hurts Christ; I’m also healing the Holy Spirit’s grief for most all people not acknowledging her as Wisdom of Proverbs in the Bible. While studying forensic psychology as “a poet on the beach” more than anything else, I take a break from God, who waived his confidentiality, as my analysand and offer him my opinion from the viewpoint of psychoanalysis. Wisdom is his unconscious mind, so she’s frequently repressed, and in Nothing, of course, she isn’t! While this is a form of forensic psychology because the law is involved, it would’ve been impossible without the spiritual study and practice of shamanism.  Therefore, the book is strongly anchored in psychospirituality.

When I was working for Journey to the Heart, which gathered healers from all over the world, the Tamayo brothers, two Ecuadorian shamans, told me that I was going to perform healing rituals that I might not survive. I was chanting in a Chumash sweat lodge weekly then, and while I didn’t know specifically what they were talking about, I believed them.  Now, I know specifically what they were talking about: the healing rituals performed for the Holy Trinity and humanity, resulting in this book.

In Nothing, there’s also one notable discovery and postulation of mine in existential psychology. It’s a strong element of the text.  Calling and developing uncertainty as the fifth ultimate concern of existential psychology will perhaps promote not only significant healing, but also great growth.   Uncertainty sometimes creates anxiety, and this requires healing.  Other times, it creates excitement—for instance, the inspiration to learn. This creates growth. Wisdom is often called Uncertainty in the text. It’s fitting to some people to see her as a personification, a mere poetic device, in the Bible, and to others, it’s fitting to see her as the essence of God, his breath, the Holy Spirit. If you’re a Gnostic, well then, Sophia, Wisdom, created the natural world! So, because of this range of possibilities, it makes good sense to call Wisdom Uncertainty also. Like Shakespeare, a great forerunner of modern psychology, who lived, as gracefully as Keats writes he did—I do believe—with Uncertainty, I live with her too. I’m married to her! My wife Lil says that it’s “crowded marriage,” the three of us. 

Uncertainty and I have children, identical twin girls, named Faith and Doubt. The reader experiences Uncertainty, Faith, and Doubt entering and exiting their hearts and minds through the core of their souls whether they’re written about by name on the page. Uncertainty, faith, and doubt are universal parts of the human condition. One must ask oneself, at certain points, whether one has doubt in one’s faith and faith in one’s doubt. Identical twins, they often play together. The four ultimate concerns of existential psychology are death, freedom, isolation, and meaninglessness. All these ultimate concerns are thoroughly addressed in the text through showing not telling in the Western and Eastern sense.

For instance, kaivalya is characterized by freedom, liberation, from the cycle of birth and death and meaningful spiritual isolation, a state of nonattachment. Empathy is critical for me as a clinician, but so is nonattachment. Without the second, I can’t be meaningfully objective. Kaivalya is something that carries over from my days as a yoga instructor into the graphic account, even in a biological sense, of being born, crucified with Christ, and born again into the moment eternal without having a karmic debt to pay on this plane of existence ever, ever again. John the Baptist was born with the spirit of Elijah. So, I believe in reincarnation: I don’t believe he was a one-off incident.

Uncertainty has been pretty well proven in Nothing to be an ultimate concern, just as universal as the other four, in an uncharacteristic way for psychology: poetry, the language of the unconscious and many other areas of consciousness and experience.  Finally, as far as this being a psychospiritual book, there are my innovations integrating automatic thoughts in cognitive behavioral therapy with Jungian collective unconscious archetypes. This is practically self-evident in the text. I’ve spoken about some feminine archetypes, and that’s for certain. But what’s uncertain is who’s Helen Aja Hammersmith-Bond to the reader? Other than we all know she’s the author of Nothing.

DG: Assonance and consonance are big parts of Pharmacy Psalms. Why do you see these as important aspects of your work and what other literary devices have you experimented with?

NG: Great point to go from referring to the text as Nothing back to referring to it as Pharmacy Psalms—the musicality, yes, the musicality—yeah, man, the groove. Okay. When I was writing only free verse, there was one form that I was partial to, and that was alliterative verse that embodied not only consonance, but also assonance. There’s the rhythm of the poem in syllables, stressed and unstressed, and this is quantitative—accentual verse. Syllabic verse counts the total number of syllables per line, and in this form of verse, the poet isn’t concerned with the number of stressed and unstressed syllables. Therefore, in Pharmacy Psalms, the syllabic couplets, one from the other, are polyrhythmic; even with the two rhymed lines, there’s polyrhythm. A couplet of 16 syllables is followed by a couplet of 12 syllables, an alexandrine—for example. This was the main form of French poetry from the 17th to 19th century. Charles Baudelaire’s a master of rhythm and rhyme in his work inspired by Jeanne Duval, his muse, his Vénus Noire. He’s a major influence on Pharmacy Psalms, so is African music, particularly from the Sub-Saharan region—Yoruba (Nigeria, Benin, and Togo). The polyrhythm of Igor Stravinsky’s compositions is also a major influence, so is the music of Bo Diddley (stepped lines). There’s also the texture of the lines, the alliteration, and this is qualitative. One chooses one over the other, usually. When I think in terms of the quantitative, Byron really mastered it in English. In my early twenties, this left me to explore the qualitative, the alliterative. There’s some alliterative verse in Pharmacy Psalms, such as in "Mars Bars." My use of alliterative verse was informed by John Coltrane's "sheets of sound" (Ira Gitler) technique to some extent at various times.

Another method I experimented with is what I call liquid solidities of music. I use the virgule, solidus, slash (/), within the line to indicate that the reader could pause at it or continue. During one read, the reader may pause at one slash, then the next read, read straight through it (a different rhythm then). I’ve been writing liquid solidity music, as far as getting it published, since the early nineties. "Leap into the Void" is an example of this style in Pharmacy Psalms. The rhythm of slashes is all about both the reader and poet's breath within the wind of the divine.

DG: The majority of Pharmacy Psalms is unrhymed free verse, and yet we have discussed form to a great extent here. How would you ultimately describe the structure of this monumental work?

NG: Too often what’s formless is given a name; then it immediately becomes a form. I’m going to discuss the union of form and structure and the difference between the two. Take for instance John Milton's Paradise Lost. It doesn’t have stanzas. It has what’s called verse paragraphs. Stanzas and verse paragraphs are used interchangeably by many people, but they’re not the same thing. While Milton’s Paradise Lost is line by line blank verse, unrhymed, iambic pentameter, the number of lines in his stanzas is irregular. Paradise Lost’s organization is what a reader would be likely to find in a prose paragraph, particularly one, of course, of the narrative variety. Milton's verse is impeccable in terms of his technical virtuosity in handling meter, but sometimes, he is too precise in his adherence to feet and what results is occasionally stilted lines—don’t step on my blue suede shoes.

Structure and form aren’t necessarily the same thing and in the case of long-poem legend, John Milton, you get a fascinating situation in which form, blank verse, is dynamically pushing and pulling against the longer measure of structure, unregulated stanza length: order and chaos with respect to poetic convention. When the Vatican was my patron through Carroll Stockard, my publisher, he would recite long passages of Milton to me. I had already read Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, and this was during the process of writing of Twin Volumes, which is highly alliterative and rhythmic. He would often say, "I like what it means, but I love how it sounds" in relation to my work. As you can discern, I have a considerable amount of respect, even admiration, for these epic poems of Milton’s on the score of form, but very little in terms of content. Satan is subtle, and in Paradise Regained, Jesus isn’t as interesting as the devil.

This brings me to my work in terms of structure and form. It's true that a considerable amount of free verse employs couplets, and the Shakespearean sonnet ends with one. However, neither form of verse is syllabic. Therefore, there really is no preexisting form in these rhyming, syllabic couplets of mine that have predominantly stepped lines. There’s certainly structure in what I’ve described, but there’s not necessarily form, unless someone coined a new term for this prosody of mine. To me personally, there’s not only a sound element to this, but also an architectural one—the stepped lines. This is maybe because my last publisher is an architect who apprenticed under Frank Gehry and has a permanent architectural model in MoMA. I think there needs to be not just one really super-pronounced rhythm and other most ambiguous ones, forms, in a long poem, and it’s best if they’re somehow interrelated.

Much of Pharmacy Psalms, if not most of it, is, indeed, in standard, unrhymed free verse; then there are some primordial chants, and there are two sonnets. One of them is Shakespearean, other than the fact that it’s in iambic octameter as opposed to the prescribed, traditional form of iambic pentameter. If you count stressed and unstressed syllables in the work of Shakespeare, one finds that the count isn’t as often what it should be by prescription in his work as it is in Milton’s; yet what one finds is that Shakespeare is generally more lyrical than Milton. This is kind of like the letter of the law versus the spirit of the law. I know about letter and spirit from forensic psychology, and it has its application to poetic form and structure.

What’s important to the poet is the spirit of the thing, and getting to the spirit of the thing can be helped by form, the letter of it metaphorically, or blocked by it. In poetry especially, one must remember one of spirit’s meanings is “breath.” Other than the words, nothing is more important than breath to prosody. Like the letter of the law and the spirit of the law, there’s the letter of the poem and the spirit of the poem.

"Sight Unseen" is a poem in Pharmacy Psalms, and it’s a Shakespearean sonnet, other than the fact it's intentionally written in iambic octameter because the symbol for infinity looks like a sideways eight, and this prosodic form matches the content of the poem. Still, there's structure to that poem; is it a Shakespearean sonnet; is it a sonnet at all? I like that you bring up the question of form because while it does seem that it’s synonymous with structure, this isn’t always the proverbial case. In Pharmacy Psalms, the really super-pronounced structure is the division of 10 tablets with cantos, poems, in their interrelated and narratively progressive two containers. It’s along the lines of the Rig Veda’s 10 mandalas and even more along the lines of how the Holy Bible is divided into two testaments consisting of 66 books with their chapters.

Click here to read Interview Part II

Author Bio:

Nelson Gary's works include XXX (Dance of the Iguana Press), Cinema (Sacred Beverage Press), A Wonderful Life in Our Lives: Sketches of a Honeymoon in Mexico (Low Profile Press), Twin Volumes (Ethelrod Press), and Pharmacy Psalms and Half-Life Hymns—for Nothing (Mystic Boxing Commission). He is an award-winning poet and essayist as well as a 2023 Pushcart Prize nominee (poetry). His work has been translated into Spanish and published internationally in numerous journals, magazines, anthologies, and newspapers, including The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry (Thunder's Mouth Press), Sequoyah Cherokee River Journal, Cooch Behar Anthology, BlazeVOX, Americans and Others: International Poetry Anthology, El Observador, Los Angeles Times, and Desert Sun. Nelson Gary has a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from California State University at Northridge and a Master of Arts degree in Forensic Psychology from The Chicago School of Professional Psychology.